“We shall do the work in the big room. Ambrose is sitting there now with father, so I made shift to slip out and let you know. There will be Ulisia, and Mary, and Vitka, and all the other Pociotek girls. Lads will be there too. Peter has promised to come and bring his fiddle.” “Peter? Who is that?” “The son of Michael who dwells beyond the Voyt’s house. He that returned from the army when potato-digging began, and talks so queerly now, one can scarce understand what he says.”[17] ----- Footnote 17: Four years in the Russian army, often in the very depths of Russia, were wont to make havoc with a Polish peasant’s mother-tongue.—_Translator’s Note._ After chattering on in this way, she ran off home. Again the room was plunged in silence. The raindrops pattered on the window-panes, like handfuls of sand thrown upon them. The wind roared and played about the garden, or blew down the chimney, till the brands on the hearthstone were scattered about, and whiffs of smoke came into the room. But the spindles never ceased from whirring about the floor. Thus the long evening dragged on tediously, until Yagna’s mother began to sing in a faint, quavering voice: “May all that we this day have done...”; Yagna and her brothers taking up the hymn in so high-pitched a key that the fowls roosting in the passage clucked and cackled in chorus. CHAPTER VII The next day was as rainy and dreary as the one before. Every now and then, someone would cone out of a hut to peer anxiously into a mist-blurred world, and see if it was clearing up a little. And nothing met the eye but the slate-coloured clouds, so low that they touched the very tree-tops. And the rain rained on. The folk were cooped up in the cabins, and getting out of sorts. One or two went out through the mud and rain to a neighbour’s, lamenting that So-and-so had left his cattle-litter in the forest, not having been able to remove it; that another had not yet brought in his firewood; that many, almost all, had cabbages in the ground still, and could not now go to cut them, because the pond had risen so much during the night that the sluices had been perforce opened, and the water let out into the river; which consequently had swollen very greatly and the meadows were flooded, and all the cabbage plantations like sombre islands amid the drab and foaming swirl. Nor had Dominikova been able to get home the cabbages she had afield. Ever since morning, Yagna was feeling greatly upset, heaving sighs of vexation as she went from corner to corner, and looked out of the window at the dahlia bushes, now beaten to the ground by the flood, and at the whole dripping landscape.