The hours slipped away in clamour and din and uproar; in noisy merry-making and dances fast and furious: they did not note that the dawn was spreading in the East, that the daybreak’s streams were slowly pouring their pallor into the night’s black gloom. The stars grew wan, the moon sank; a wind that sprang up beyond the woods passed by, chasing the dark that waxed thinner and thinner: the gnarled tufted trees looked in at the windows, bowing yet lower their slumberous frost-crowned heads, but the folk within were singing and dancing still! The doors had been thrown wide open; so had the windows; the house, brimming and boiling over with lights and tumult, trembled, creaked and groaned, while the dance went on, now in utterly uncontrollable and rapturous excitement. It seemed to those within—such was their state!—that trees and people, earth and stars, and the hedges and the time-honoured cabin itself, were all wrestling and writhing together, united in one inextricably whirling cluster, blind, intoxicated, raving, and in utter oblivion of all; reeling and rolling from room to room, from wall to wall, from passage to passage, and out into the road and the enormous world, caught in a round that filled the universe—fading away in the long unbroken chain of crimson lights now glowing in the East! And the music led them on—the tunes played and the songs. How they kept time in their growling, the gruff bass-viols, uttering their broken humming sounds, like huge humble-bees! And how the flutes led the band, merrily whistling and twittering, as in mockery of the drum’s joyful thuds and strokes, swelled by the jingling of its bells that shook with laughter, and floated lightly like a Jew’s beard in the wind! And then how the fiddles took the lead and came to the front, like girls leading the ballet, and sang out loud and shrill at first as though to try their voices—then played with wide, sorrowful, heart-rending sweeps of the bow—the lamentations of orphans driven from their homes—and then again, with an instantaneous change, fell into a lilting tune—short, trilling, sharp, like the tripping of a hundred dancers’ heels, at which a hundred full-throated lads shouted themselves out of breath, and quivered all over, and set once more to turn and sing and dance mincingly, laughing and rejoicing, heat rising anew to the head and desire to the heart, lie strong vodka ... when they fell again into the slow long notes of sorrow and weeping—as dew upon the plains!—uttering the notes of our own beloved tune, most near to the heart, instinct with mighty yearning tenderness, and making all dance deliriously to the strains of our Mazovian air! * * * * *