Take for example, “_She is the Earth_,” where the Bukovina refugees make their way to the north. Old Danilo has brought his family with him but his wife is silent. From the time when they abandoned their little farm before the onrushing armies, she has remained still and silent. Old Semen, the same type of man, advises the newcomer to go home. “An old bird must not leave its old nest, for it is not able to build another. It is better that its head grows cold in its old nest than in a hollow on a strange road.” He warns against following the lords and the Jews. “The Emperor has his purse open for them, but the purse is closed for you....” “Our work is with the earth; you abandon it, you are lost, you cling to it, it rakes out all your strength from you, it fills your soul with its hands; you fall down to it, you bend your back, it fills your veins, for that you have flocks and herds, and haystacks. For your strength it gives you a hut full of children and grandchildren, who laugh as silver bells, and bloom like poplars.... Don’t go, Danilo, with the lords and the Jews, don’t seek the tsar, for you do not need the tsar; there is always someone to come to the farm to collect the taxes.” And it is only then that the old woman finds her voice and says,--“Let us go home, Danilo, let us go home.” “And when the sun rose, the old men parted, they kissed their black hands, and the red sun threw their shadows across the boundary far along the earth.” This is the creed of the peasant, the creed of the earth, and it was a new note for Stefanyk. It is perhaps too optimistic. It perhaps shows a narrow conception of life but it is the fundamental essence of the peasant wisdom put in a simple form. It opens a new vista to the reader, it gives a psychological motive and a philosophy that had been hitherto lacking in his work. Now in his later stories he ventures to give the world and his characters some elements of philosophy other than the cynical or coldly unmoral picture of human dissolution and disaster. Stefanyk was working toward a deeper and a more satisfactory philosophy of life under the pressure of the events of the World War. Yet his basis was the impartial observation of the poor material condition of the average Galician village in the period when the old safeguards had been removed by the abolition of feudal powers and when the individual peasant was not yet effectively trained to stand for himself.