While I read the letter to the priest, Maciej kept quiet, listening and possibly also beginning to consider what I was to write to his wife, if I answered to the hopes he had placed in me. But when I came to the passage in which I asked the priest about the Mass for the shoemaker's dead parents, there was a violent crash in the entrance to the kitchen, and Maciej stood before us in all his impressiveness. His appearance was so unexpected, and made with so much noise, that we looked at him in astonishment. Maciej was strangely altered, and even seemed to me to be trembling all over. He came out in silence, and standing just in front of us, with his feet wide apart as usual, he began to search for his pocket; but whether it was difficult to find in the folds of his baggy trousers, or whether for some other reason, he was a long time about it. Having found it, he drew out a small purse, and, after a long process of untying, for which he also used his teeth, he took out a crumpled three-rouble note. He stood a while holding this. At last he laid it on the table with a shaking hand, and began in an imploring, broken voice: "If that's so--when he says the Mass, let him pray for us unhappy folks too: write that, sir. Let him pray to Almighty God and to the Holy Virgin--if it's only to bring our bones back there--and perhaps--perhaps They'll have mercy." "Perhaps They'll have mercy," the shoemaker repeated like an echo, as he stood beside Maciej. They stood before me--these two old men grown grey in adversity--as small children stand before a stern father, feeling their helplessness; the lame shoemaker with the hollow eyes, leaning on his stick, and that huge peasant with his hands hanging down and head bowed humbly, imploring this in a quiet whisper. * * * * * We should certainly have sat there a long while in painful musing if it had not been for the shoemaker. Stanisław was the first to rouse himself from the lethargy into which we had fallen. "What the devil are we doing! Maciej, bestir yourself! The sausages are burning in there, and the brandy is getting stale! Eh, Maciej, look sharp!" Maciej crept to the kitchen, and returned to us--not, to say the truth, very quickly--preceded by the smell of well-fried sausages. We shook off our lethargy so slowly, however, that even the brisk shoemaker had to make an effort to put a good face on it. His first toast was, "The success of the letters." To this Maciej responded with "Amen," and a sigh which might have come from a pair of blacksmith's bellows. The vodka did its work, however. Our recent emotion strengthened its effect, and after two glasses even an observant person would never have guessed what we had thought and felt here a few moments earlier, but for the letters lying in Stanisław's trunk. The last vestiges of sadness were charmed away by the little song which Stanisław began to sing: