Even as a small child Rosa Tiralla had often been in the Przykop. Her nurse had always taken her there, for the wind, which swept across the plain endangering the life of the delicate child, was hardly felt there. The trees in the hollow were so well protected by the rising ground that only their tops rustled slightly in the wind. Rosa very often lifted the rusty latch of the gate that separated the morass from the little garden at the back of Starydwór. "How lovely the mountains and valleys of the Przykop were," thought the child of the plain. In her eyes the slight incline down which she used to glide was a deep, deep valley, and the hill she used to climb so [Pg 138] laboriously, holding fast to the luxuriant moss, ferns, and projecting tree-roots, a big, big mountain. The deer would approach Rosa without fear, and look at her with their limpid eyes. But she was full of fear; not of the deer, however, but of the other creatures which surrounded her in the Przykop. The older she grew, the more fearful she became. Marianna had told her too many tales about them. The deep, deep silence, in which the woodpecker's hammering on the bark used to sound like peals of thunder, made her shudder. And still she would not have liked to give up that sweet emotion, nor give up lying in the thick moss, gazing up into the tree-tops to find a bit of sky. She was always within call, and that reassured her. But if a sound found its way to her--her father's deep, bass voice, or her mother's treble, or the maid's "_Psia krew_, where have you got to?"--she would give a start as though she had been roughly handled or had been caught doing something wrong, and turn scarlet and sigh as she smoothed her thick, tousled hair. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Rosa Tiralla was very busy looking for mushrooms in the Przykop this summer. It was the time of the damp, sultry dog-days, in which they sprang up in a night. But not many were eaten in Starawies or the neighbourhood, for the public had been warned against them. The schoolmaster had also warned the children in the school; they were neither to gather nor eat any they were not quite sure of. People grew alarmed. "Many people have made themselves ill with eating mushrooms," said Marianna to her mistress, when the latter spoke of sending Rosa to fetch some. Mrs. Tiralla laughed. "Nonsense, I know mushrooms very well." [Pg 139] "That makes no difference," exclaimed the maid, growing warm, "I won't eat them even if I do know them. Ugh!" she spat on the ground, "mushrooms are the devil's own vegetables." "Why?" The woman looked at the maid with dull, wide-open eyes, in which a dawning light suddenly began to gleam. She turned red and pale by turns, blinked her eyes a little as though something were dazzling her, and then smiled. "What do you mean by 'the devil's own vegetables'? I don't understand you."