For at that moment all bickerings were done with, all quarrels appeased: everyone felt full of loving-kindness towards everyone. Cries of gladness echoed from hut to hut, and trilled through the balmy air. Then did they throw the cabin-doors wide open, and remove the windows from their clamped fastenings to let in the air; the women took their spinning-gear outside, and even the babes were carried out in their cradles to get some sunlight. From the byres, again and again, there floated the anxious lowing of the kine; horses neighed, eager to quit their stables; cocks crowed in the hedges, and dogs, barking wildly, ran about like mad, and splashed with the children in the mud. Their elders, staying within the enclosures, blinked in the dazzling sunbeams, and looked with delight at the country round, all bathed in splendour. Women chatted together over their orchard-fences, and their voices resounded afar. They told how someone had heard the song of a lark, how wagtails had been seen on the poplar road—and then another caught sight of a string of wild geese far up in the sky, and half the village ran out to look at them—and a third affirmed that storks had already alighted on the flats by the mill. This was doubted, for March had not yet begun its third week. And then a lad brought in the first spray of blossoms, and ran with it round to every hut, where they gloated over the pale clusters in deep admiration, as over some most sacred thing. So that illusory spell of warmth had made them all believe that spring was at their gates, and that presently they would be ploughing their fields. Their dismay and mortification were therefore all the more intense, when they saw the sky suddenly clouded over, the sun quite hidden from sight, all the brightness faded, the land darkened once more, and a thin rain beginning to fall! With the coming of night, the rain was followed by snow; and very shortly the village and its environs were whitened over anew. Things were again in their former state; and the subsequent days of slush and mire and wet made them feel almost as though the past hours of sunshine had been only a bright dream. Whilst folks were spending their days in such hopes and desires, and joys so soon doomed to disappointment, it was quite natural that Antek’s conduct, the domestic troubles of Boryna, and all the rest—even to the deaths which took place—should fall into forgetfulness, like a stone flung into a deep lake: every man had enough worries of his own, and scarcely knew how to bear them. But the days rolled on, neither stopping nor hurrying, without end, without commencement, as the waves of a great sea: hardly had they opened their eyes and looked round, and taken note of a few things (how few!), when twilight was there again, and night, and then another day dawned with its own fresh troubles. And all was repeated once more, that the will of God might be accomplished upon earth!