"_Psia krew!_" He stumbled, cursed, and scolded, and then he laughed. He felt that he had drunk too much--oho, he would never be so drunk that he couldn't feel what he had been up to. But to be a little drunk was a very useful thing now and then. For then you didn't feel the oppression quite so much. [Pg 136] CHAPTER VII The strawberries were ripening in the Przykop. The children from Starawies would go there to look for them, and when they had all been gathered it would be the time for mushrooms. But the village children did not like the gloom that reigned in the Przykop, they were accustomed to let the rays of the burning sun scorch their brown bodies a still darker brown amid the flat turnip fields and immense plains covered with corn, where there were no shadows to arrest its full force. The big pines commenced just at the back of Starydwór, and beyond those were the alders and willows, extending as far as the low-lying marshes, where the frogs croaked at night, the white water-lilies opened their golden calices at midday, and where towards evening the game from the royal forest in the blue distance beat a path through the rustling reeds on their way to quench their thirst at the pools. A long, long time ago the whole of the Przykop was said to have been an enormous lake, ten times as big as now. Now nothing remained of it but the basin in the centre, that deep depression which, so to speak, formed a hollow amid the yellow and green carpet of this fruitful corn-land. But at night, when the will-o'-the-wisps wandered about the marshes and danced on the duckweed, in which a man could be swallowed up if he did not take care where he put his foot, the pious people [Pg 137] would make the sign of the cross when they were obliged to pass that way. For the will-o'-the-wisps were the souls of those who could not find peace in the grave. Rosa Tiralla much preferred the Przykop to the bare fields. If she stood at the farm gate and looked across the fields she could see the whole way to Starawies, the path she took to school every day, the wooden church tower and the cottage roofs covered with moss, that almost disappeared from view behind the pale, waving corn when it stood high. But from her bedroom window at the back of the house, she could look into the Przykop, where the dark trees rustled so strangely. The white-faced child felt the mystery of the morass just as much as the brown-skinned children from Starawies; but while it terrified them, it attracted her. How beautiful to be in the deep, cool shade when the sun was scorching outside. There was always a soft twilight under the trees, and when the light fell through the interlaced branches on the damp, green moss, it was no longer cruel, it was transfigured.