The woman put her hands to her mouth and imitated the call of the wood-dove in the most perfect manner. At once the cry of the hawk came back from the forest, and soon afterwards a boy came running out, who, however, stopped short, with an air of distrust and apprehension, as soon as he saw the stranger. The mother uttered a few words in an unknown tongue, and he seemed to feel at once reassured. He came forward, offered Oswald fearlessly the tin cup which he was holding in his hand, and said: "Will you drink, sir?" The cup was not particularly neat, but the boy far too strikingly handsome to be refused, even if Oswald had been less thirsty than he really was. Cziko was perhaps ten years old, but he also looked older. The damp fogs drifting over autumnal fields, and the snow-storms whistling through the hawthorn bushes had washed out the youthful freshness of the boy's face, and given an expression of sorrow and defiance to the dark gazelle eyes, so that one could not look at them without feeling saddened. The woman saw at once, with the doubly sharp eye of the beggar and the mother, what a deep impression her boy had made upon the stranger. "Yes, he is a fine boy, the Cziko," she said, "swift like a squirrel, and brave like a wild-cat, and he plays the cymbal like no other." "Is that a cymbal hanging on the tree there?" asked Oswald, somewhat surprised that the instrument was really existing somewhere else but in Holy Writ and poetry. "Go, Cziko, show the gentleman what you know," said the woman. The boy took the instrument down, laid it carefully on the stump of a tree, and, seizing the two sticks, began a most wondrous music, striking first slowly and then quicker and quicker. His heart seemed to be overflowing with music; his hollow brown cheeks flushed up; his dark eyes, which he raised now and then dreamily to the tree-tops, shone brightly. Then he fell into another movement and another air, and after a few bars, the woman, who had in the mean time made a brisk fire under a kettle, began to sing, in a low, melodious voice, one of those Sclavonic national songs, whose plaintive air is apt to make the heart melancholy and the eyes tearful. Oswald sat there, leaning his head on his hand and listening as in a dream. He felt as if the sad notes, such as he had never heard before, were calling forth entirely new feelings in his bosom; as if they excited deep sympathy in him with his own life, and the life of all other beings, and made him long and yearn after an infinite, nameless happiness. The song came to an end. Oswald started up. He looked at his watch. Three hours had passed away since he had entered the forest; if he wished to see Melitta to-day he must not lose another moment.