Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) HANIA. BY HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ, AUTHOR OF "QUO VADIS," "WITH FIRE AND SWORD," "THE DELUGE," "CHILDREN OF THE SOIL," ETC. _TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY_ JEREMIAH CURTIN. BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 1897. _Copyright, 1897_, BY JEREMIAH CURTIN. _All rights reserved._ University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. CONTENTS. PAGE PROLOGUE TO HANIA: THE OLD SERVANT 3 HANIA 21 TARTAR CAPTIVITY 171 LET US FOLLOW HIM 219 BE THOU BLESSED 259 AT THE SOURCE 265 CHARCOAL SKETCHES 291 THE ORGANIST OF PONIKLA 375 LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET 387 ON THE BRIGHT SHORE 401 THAT THIRD WOMAN 483 PROLOGUE. THE OLD SERVANT. Besides old managers, overseers, and foresters there is another type of man which is disappearing more and more from the face of the earth,--the old servant. During my childhood, as I remember, my parents were served by one of those mammoths. After those mammoths there will soon be only bones in old cemeteries, in strata thickly covered with oblivion; from time to time investigators will dig them out. This old servant was called Mikolai Suhovolski; he was a noble from the noble village of Suha Vola, which he mentioned often in his stories. He came to my father from my grandfather of sacred memory, with whom he was an orderly in the time of the Napoleonic wars. He did not himself remember accurately when he began service with my grandfather; when he was asked for the date, he took snuff, and answered,-- "Yes, I was then without mustaches, and the colonel, God light his soul, was still very young." In the house of my parents he fulfilled the most varied duties: he was butler; he was body-servant; in summer he went to the harvest fields in the rôle of overseer, in winter to the threshing; he kept the keys of the vodka room, the cellar, the granary; he wound up the clocks; but above all he kept the house in order. I do not remember this man otherwise than scolding. He scolded my father, he scolded my mother; I feared him as fire, though I liked him. In the kitchen he worked off a whole breviary on the cook, he pulled the pantry boys by the ears through the house, and never was he content with anything. Whenever he got tipsy, which happened once a week, all avoided him, not because he permitted himself to have words with his master or mistress, but because whenever he fastened on any one, he followed that person all day, nagging and scolding without end.