'What's the good of the smoke to you? I'll give you my pipe to finish, and meanwhile it does not grieve the old woman to see me sitting here wasting my time.' He lit his pipe very deliberately, rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and looked into the valley, watching the crowd of Germans. With their covered carts they had enclosed a square into which they had driven their cattle and horses; inside and outside of this the people were bustling about. Some put a portable manger on a stand and fed the cows, others ran to the river with buckets. The women brought out their saucepans and little sacks of vegetables and a crowd of children ran down the ravine for fuel. 'What crowds of children they have!' said Slimak; 'we have not as many in the whole village.' 'Thick as lice,' said Maciek. Slimak could not wonder enough. Yesterday the field had been empty and quiet, to-day it was like a fair. People by the river, people in the ravines, people on the fields, who chop the bushes, carry wood, make fires, feed and water the animals! One man had already opened a retail-shop on a cart and was obviously doing good business. The women were pressing round him, buying salt, sugar, vinegar. Some young mothers had made cradles of shawls, suspended on short pitchforks, and while they were cooking with one hand they rocked the cradle with the other. There was a veterinary surgeon, too, who examined the foot of a lame horse, and a barber was shaving an old Swabian on the step of his cart. 'Do you notice how quickly they work? It's farther for them to fetch the firewood than for us, yet we take half the day over it and they do it before you can say two prayers.' 'Oh! oh!' said Maciek, who seemed to feel this remark as an aspersion. 'But, then, they work together, 'continued Slimak; 'when our people go out in a crowd every one attends to his own business, and rests when he likes or gets into the way of the others. But these dogs work together as if they were used to each other; if one of them were to lie down on the ground the others would cram work into his hand and stand over him till he had finished it. Watch them yourself.' He gave his pipe to Maciek and returned to the cottage. 'They are quick folk, those Swabians,' he muttered, 'and clever!' Within half an hour he had discovered the two secrets of modern work: organization and speed. About noon two colonists came to the gospodarstwo and asked Slimak to sell them butter and potatoes and hay. He let them have the former without bargaining, but he refused the hay. 'Let us at least have a cartload of straw,' they asked with their foreign accent. 'I won't. I haven't got any.' The men got angry. 'That scoundrel Hamer is giving us no end of trouble,' one cried, dashing his cap on the ground; 'he told us we should get fodder and everything at the farms. We can't get any at the manor either; the Jews from the inn are there and won't stir from the place.'