"I told thee once that I like, above all, to do what pleases me, and that it pleases me most to do nothing; hence it is that doing nothing I do what pleases me most. If thou art wise, prove that I have uttered nonsense. Take the second case: Suppose me a buckwheat sower; that, however, simply passes imagination. I, for whom rain or fine weather is merely the question of choosing a cane or an umbrella, would have, in my old age, to stand on one leg, like a stork, and look to see whether it pleases the sun to shine, or the clouds to drop rain. I should have to tremble as to whether my wheat is likely to grow, or my rape-seed shed, or rot fall on the potatoes; whether I shall be able to stake my peas, or furnish his Worship of Dogweevil as many bushels as I have promised; whether my plough-horses have the glanders, and my sheep the foot-rot. I should, in my old age, come to this,--that from blunting of faculties I would interject after every three words: 'Pan Benefactor,' or 'What is it that I wanted to say?' _Voyons! pas si bête!_ I, a free man, should become a _glebæ adscriptus_, a 'Neighbor,' a 'Brother Lata,' a 'Pan Matsyei,' a 'Lechit.'"[5] Here, roused a little by the wine, he began to quote in an undertone the words of Slaz in "Lilla Weneda":-- "Am I a Lechit? What does this mean? Are boorishness, Drunkenness, gluttony, gazing from my eyes With the seven deadly sins, a passion for uproar, Pickled cucumbers, and escutcheons?" "Argue with him," said Pan Stanislav, "especially when at the root of the matter he is partly right." But Marynia, who as soon as Bukatski had begun to speak of work in the country, grew somewhat thoughtful, shook thoughtfulness now from her forehead, and said,-- "When papa was not well,--and never in Kremen has he been so well as recently,--I saved him a little in management, and later that work became for me a habit. Though God knows there was no lack of troubles, it gave me a pleasure that I cannot describe. But I did not understand the cause of this till Pan Yamish explained it. 'That,' said he, 'is the real work on which the world stands, and every other is either the continuation of it, or something artificial.' Later I understood even things which he did not explain. More than once, when I went out to the fields in spring, and saw that all things were growing, I felt that my heart, too, was growing with them. And now I know why that is: In all other relations that a man holds there may be deceit, but the land is truth. It is impossible to deceive the land; it either gives, or gives not, but it does not deceive. Therefore land is loved, as truth; and because one loves it, it teaches one to love. And the dew falls not only on grain, and on meadows, but on the soul, as it were; and a man becomes better, for he has to deal with truth, and he loves,--that is, he is nearer God. Therefore I loved my Kremen so much."