“Gee-up! my little one, gee-up!” He cracked his whip, for the road sloped upwards, though slightly, towards the forest, black in the distance. The silence made Boryna drowsy; he gazed through the colonnade of poplars upon the fields bathed in the rosy radiance, and tried to think of Eva’s accusation and of Red-and-White’s death; but he could not help feeling slumber coming on. Birds were chirruping in the boughs; through the tree-tops murmured the wind, here and there bringing down a leaflet, like a golden butterfly, that settled with a whirl on the road, or on some dusty clump of thistles, whose fiery eyes opened bravely to the sun. And the poplars talked one with another, and murmured softly with swaying boughs, and then were still. It was only when he had reached the forest, and the horse stopped, that he woke up completely. “The corn is coming up nicely here,” he mused, gazing sunwards at the grey fields, with their rust-coloured haze of sprouting rye. “A good bit of land, and next to mine—just as if it had been put there on purpose!—This rye, I think, was not sown long ago.” He cast a longing glance at the recently harrowed lands, and then, uttering a sigh, entered the forest. Here, however, a cold bleak wind, driving in his face, quite dispelled his reverie. The forest was very old and very great. It stood, compact and thick, in the majesty of age and strength combined. Nearly all the trees were pines; but not unfrequently an ancient spreading oak would appear, or some birches, in their smocks of white bark, let their tangled yellow foliage float in the air. The lower growths—the hazel-nut, the dwarf hornbeam, and the trembling aspen—were crowded around the mighty red pine-trunks, so closely and with branches so intertwined, that the sunbeams could but seldom touch the ground, where they seemed to be crawling, like bright-hued insects, over the mosses and reddish faded ferns. “All this is mine. Four acres,” he reflected, devouring the wood with his eyes, and gloating over the best bits of timber. “Ah! the Lord will not let us be wronged! Nor will we let people wrong us, either! The manor folk think what we have is too much: we think it too little.—Let me see: my four, and Yagna’s one; four and one’s.... Gee-up! foolish beast! Afraid of magpies?” He whipped her up smartly; for, upon the dry Tree, where the crucified Christ was hanging, magpies were quarrelling so violently that the filly had pricked up her ears and stopped short. “‘Magpies’ quarrelling, rain will surely bring,’” he muttered, and with a few strokes of the whip mended the filly’s pace to a trot. It was now well past eight, for the people in the fields were sitting down to breakfast, when he came to Timow: a small town whose empty narrow streets were lined with dilapidated houses, like rows of old saleswomen—lining gutters full of rubbish, and dirty Jewish children, and pigs.