Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/20

 The morning sunrise beheld the venerable host on the alert to attend to the comfort of his guests. Breakfast consisting of coarse bread, apparently of barley and millet, and wild venison accompanied with home-brewed beer promised a substantial support for the expected fatigue of the coming journey. “You will need it all and more,” replied the old man in answer to a remark on his munificent hospitality. “The country you will pass through has been, I fear, ravaged and wasted in all directions. Already the destroyers have crossed the March, and scattered bands of them are even now plundering the helpless cottagers in Moravia. I fear that dreadful woes await us here. The ruin inflicted by the Tartar hordes in my youth was indeed a shocking sight, but even they disappeared almost as speedily as they came. Now we have a foe that will seize us in his talons and tear us with his ravenous beak. He is a foe that has come to stay; and he is more pitiless than the insatiate bird that emblems him. The skull and bones that figured the Tartar carnage might be appropriately borrowed by the new destroyers. The former created a desolation of death; the latter will set up a living pandemonium.”

“We have but recently reached these borders,” exclaimed the strangers in rapid succession. “We have carefully abstained from discussions, and from association indeed with those we meet.” “I have ensconced myself in the quietest corners,” declared the Jew, “and have passed along as if no outward purpose moved me. Journeying swiftly and in silence, I have