"So you'd think; but it's really all the same. Take me, for example. No one could say of me that I'm work-shy, yet nothing I have to do with ever comes off. And why?--Why? Because I'm not at my own work. So though I work and don't drink, I'm wasting like sheep in rough weather. I'm already more like a dog at a fair than a man,--only there's no fair. I saw that from the moment I came here. For isn't it a queer thing that a land like this, with rivers like the sea, mountains as big as the Łysia Góra at home, meadows with grass up to your middle, should have no sheep! Our shepherds are wise men; they can bewitch you and free you from spells, and have remedies for this and that; yet if you told them that in all this big country there are no sheep, they wouldn't believe you." Bartek was a temporary inhabitant of this desert solitude. He was a very respectable man, but a kind of fatality hung over him; he was industrious and honest, yet he had never been able to find an occupation in which he could display his qualities and draw attention to himself. He had come here not long beforehand, attracted by the promises of some emigration agents. The promises had not been fulfilled, and Bartek, taking advantage in the meantime of this shelter, was only waiting for the frosts to abate a little before setting out on his return journey. He was a grave man--in fact, almost too serious. He did not care for idle talk, and rarely started a conversation; but when he did speak, it was always laconically and with decision, brooking no contradiction. As the representative of a class which for long ages had been fairly privileged, he was an ardent Conservative, and did not admit the desirability of social reform. "A dog is a dog, and a sheep is a sheep," was his maxim. He raised the authority of his moral leaders almost to a religious cult, and it was not always safe to express an opinion before him, which even remotely reflected on the authority he acknowledged. "Who says so?" Bartek would ask threateningly on such occasions. And when he was not too much irritated, and able to control himself, he would shake his thick fist in the speaker's face, and solemnly announce: "Only fools talk like that!" In the other equally large room two more permanent inhabitants of this solitude were to be found: the locksmith, Porankiewicz, and the ex-landowner, once Pan Feliks Babiński. If Horodelski was a man standing on the edge of a precipice, Porankiewicz had rolled to the very bottom long ago. When I went into the room, he was scraping together something near the little table which he called his bench. He was pale, thin, and very small, and appeared still smaller owing to his stoop; few quite old men would walk more bent. "Do hold yourself straight just for once," I often used to say to him.