Just then the sun’s red burning eye peeped at them from afar, and the _Komorniki_ arrived to pay with their work for the flax and potato-fields they had rented. She set Yuzka to peeling potatoes, gave suck to her babies, put her apron on over her head, and said: “Keep an eye on everything here! And should Antek come, let me know: I shall be in the cabbage-field.—Come, good folk, while it is still cool and dewy. We shall first earth up the cabbages, and set to yesterday’s work again after breakfast.” As they walked on down by the old disused peat-diggings, a few lapwings circled over their heads and some storks were wading about the low marshy ground, stepping carefully, and thrusting their heads forward. In the air there was a marshy smell, mixed with that of the sweet flag and the sedges, with clumps of which the old peat-diggings were overgrown. Then they set to work, beginning their talk (of course with the inexhaustible topic of the weather) while they earthed up the cabbage-plants, that had grown well, but were greatly infested with weeds—towering dandelions, rank duckweeds, and even forests of thistles. “‘What man needs not nor sows, most abundantly grows,’” said one woman, knocking the earth from the roots of a weed. “And all evil things likewise,” said another; “sin is sown by none, yet the world is full thereof.” “Because its life is sturdy!” Yagustynka struck in, to air her peculiar views. “My dear! so long as man lives, sin shall live. Do they not say: ‘If sin you destroy, you kill all our joy’? and again: ‘But for sin dearly cherished, long ago man had perished.’—It must, then, be good for something, just as this weed is: our Lord made them both!” This theology was sternly rebuked by Hanka. “What!... Our Lord make evil? It is only man that, like a swine, mars all things with his rooting snout.” And they said no more. The sun was up in the sky now, and the mists had all disappeared, when troops of other women came along from the village. Hanka laughed at them. “Fine workers! Waiting till the dew shall dry, lest they wet their feet!” “Not all are so eager for work as you are.” “And not all are forced to work so hard,” she answered with a sigh. “Well, your goodman is coming back: then will ye rest.” “I have vowed, if he returns, to go to Chenstohova for the day of Our Lady of Angels. And the Voyt tells me he is coming to-day.” “The folk at the Bureau must know: so the news will be true.—But what a number of people are off to Chenstohova on foot this year! The organist’s wife is to be a pilgrim too, they say; and she tells me that the priest is to come with the pilgrimage.” Yagustynka made fun of the idea. “Who will carry his guts for him? He will never do so by himself.—Nay, ’tis only a promise, as usual with him.” “I have been there several times, with the others, and should long to go every year,” sighed Filipka—she from over the water. “Everyone longs for a spell of idleness.”