THE PEASANTS SPRING THE PEASANTS A TALE OF OUR OWN TIMES IN FOUR VOLUMES AUTUMN WINTER SPRING SUMMER[1] ----- Footnote 1: _To be published July, 1925_ THE PEASANTS SPRING FROM THE POLISH OF LADISLAS REYMONT [Illustration: Publisher’s Logo] ALFRED · A · KNOPF NEW YORK MCMXXV PUBLISHED APRIL, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. SECOND PRINTING, APRIL, 1925 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHER’S NOTE _The Peasants_ has been translated from the original Polish by Michael H. Dziewicki, Reader of English Literature at the University of Cracow. I wish to make special acknowledgment to Dr. A. M. Nawench of Columbia University for his invaluable assistance in seeing the work through the press. A. A. K. THE PEASANTS SPRING CHAPTER I Spring had come. Like a toiler who, having slept the sleep of exhaustion, is forced to rise ere dawn after a too short rest, and go out and plough without delay, the April morning was rising lazily. It was grey dawn. Silence reigned everywhere, save for the copious dews that dropped and dripped from the trees, wrapped in dense mists and slumbering. Over the black earth, plunged in stillness and deep darkness, the sky was beginning to glimmer palely, and look like a sheet of wringing wet bluish canvas. All the low-lying meadows were whitish with mantling haze, which resembled the frothy head of milk in a pail. Cocks presently vied with one another, crowing in the yet invisible hamlets. The last stars went out, closing their tired and sleepy eyes. And now a glow was kindled in the East, as when they blow on embers half quenched in the ashes. The floating mists rolled heavily hither and thither, surged about the dusky fields as floods in the spring thaw, or went up the sky in thin blue spirals, like incense smoke. The day was at odds with the paling night, which crouched and clung close to the earth, covering it with its thick wet cloak.