“Oh, do leave off!” Nastka called out. “You are making Yagna cry.” “No, no; I always feel tearful when there is music,” Yagna whispered, covering her face with her apron. But she could not help the tears that flowed against her will, called forth by the strange yearning which she felt within her—and for what? She knew not. The young fellow went on playing; only the fiddle now poured out riotous Mazurs and such lively Obertas that the girls could scarce remain seated, but must perforce squeeze their restless quivering knees together to do so, while the boys stamped merrily and hummed the tunes, and the whole room was in a tumult of noise and laughter, and the very window-panes were shaking. On a sudden, a dog in the passage set up a lamentable howl, a howl so piercing that on the spot the room became as still as death. “What is that?” Roch had dashed out so suddenly that he had narrowly missed falling over the cabbage-cutter. “No great thing,” Antek cried, after a look into the passage; “some lad has been squeezing a dog’s tail in the doorway.” “Vitek’s work, I make no doubt,” Boryna said. Yuzka defended the boy most earnestly: “What, Vitek cruel to a dog? Never!” Roch now returned, very greatly agitated. He had probably let the dog loose, for it was heard outside, whining close to the fence. “A dog, too, is God’s creature,” he said excitedly, “and it suffers when ill-treated, as does any man. Our Lord also had a dog of His own, and suffered no one to use it ill.” “What? The Lord Jesus had a dog, just as men have?” queried Yagustynka the doubter. “I tell you that He had; and Burek was its name.” The statement was received with a chorus of exclamations: “Well-a-day!—How now? Can this be!” and so on. Roch was silent for a while; then, raising his hoary head, covered with long hair save in front, where it was cut straight and short over the forehead, and fixing upon the fire those eyes out of which the colour seemed to have been washed by many a tear, he began to speak slowly, his beads slipping meanwhile through his fingers. “In those far-off bygone times, when Jesus our Lord yet walked upon this earth, and ruled over the nations in His own Person, the thing of which I shall tell you came to pass. “Now, Jesus was going to the local feast in the parish of Mstov. And there was no road thither, but the way was through desolate burning sands only; and the sun beat hot upon them, and the air was even as when a storm is nigh at hand. “Nor was there any shade or shelter anywhere. “Our Lord walked on patiently; but though He was not yet near the forest, His holy feet were quite numb with weary travel, and He felt exceeding great thirst. Therefore did he again and again stop to rest on some hillock upon the way: albeit the heat there was still greater, and there was not enough shadow from the few dry stalks of mullein for even a fowl of the air to find shelter.