The agreement was carried out, and before Holy Week both Slimak and Gryb's son were married. By the autumn Slimak's new gospodarstwo was finished, and an addition to his family expected. His second wife not unfrequently reminded him that he had been a beggar and owed all his good fortune to her. At such times he would slip out of the house, lie under the lonely pine and meditate, recalling the strange struggle, when the Germans had lost their land and he his nearest and dearest. When everybody else had forgotten Slimakowa, Stasiek, Maciek, and the child, he often remembered them, and also the dog Burek and the cow doomed to the butcher's knife for want of fodder. Silly Zoska died in prison, old Sobieska at the inn. The others with whom my story is concerned, not excepting old Jonah, are alive and well. A PINCH OF SALT BY ADAM SZYMANSKI It was in the fourth year of my exile to the metropolis of the Siberian frosts, a few days before Christmas, when one of our comrades and fellow-sufferers, a former student at the university of Kiev, who hailed from Little-Russia, called in to give us some interesting news. One of his intimate friends--also an ex-student and fellow-sufferer--was to pass through our town on his way back from a far-distant Yakut aul,[1] where he had lived for three years; he was due to arrive on Christmas Eve. [Footnote 1: _Aul: a hamlet_.] We had repeatedly met people who knew the life in the nearer Yakut settlements; now and then we had seen temporary or permanent inhabitants of the so-called Yakut 'towns' of Vjerchojansk, Vihijsk, and Kalymsk. But the nearer auls and towns were populous centres of human life in comparison to those far-off deserted and desolate places; they gave one no conception of what the latter might be like. Certainly the fact that the worst criminals, when they were sent to those regions, preferred to return to hard labour rather than live in liberty there, gave us an illustration of the charms of that life, yet it told us nothing definite.