many miles through lanes and by-ways rather than allow himself to be surprised at night in the neighbourhood of the burial-ground. As to dwelling here day after day and night after night, for a whole year, for all one’s life—you might have built a golden palace on the spot and I know not whether you would have found in the whole country-side a man to inhabit it.
Logic sometimes makes strange skips. All will perceive that a place which every one shuns after dark is one of perfect security. A child might stand a siege there, and the puniest could put to flight the staunchest-hearted. And yet every grown-up person would have considered himself a poor creature if he had settled there as grave-digger. And yet, on the other hand, he thought to himself that the grave-digger ought to be a perfect Hercules to bear calmly all the horrors of the place—the glowering of the crosses over the wall, the thumping of the tinned figure of the Christus, the flittering of the bats, the desolateness of the bone-house, and similar things.
By a strange coincidence it happened that the grave-digger was the Hercules of the neighbourhood, Bartos, about whom whole books might be written. If Bartos had ever said, “I will give battle to a ghost”, every one would have wagered that Bartos would get the best of the encounter—such a man and no other was cut out to be a grave-digger in a lonely cemetery. So then, perhaps, it came to pass that the popular logic argued backwards, as thus: because the present grave-digger, Bartos, was the Hercules of the neighbourhood, it followed that only a Hercules was fit to be a grave-digger in that spot.
How many a story of his strength was recounted by credible eye-witnesses. Once on Sunday, when Bartos was on the spree, there drove into Frishets a drag full of soldiers on leave, and in their insolence they chevied the people hither and thither and struck at every one who approached their vehicle. Hereupon arose a panic in the village, people ran out of the ale-house and among them Bartos. Bartos seized hold of the horses, held them back, and held back even the vehicle. But, thereby, he effected but little, because he could not approach the carriage seeing that the soldiers struck out at every one. “Come and hold the horses! come and hold the horses!” shouted Bartos to his neighbours. And when the neighbours held the horses Bartos crept under the carriage, arched his back against it, lifted it off the ground and upset it, so that the soldiers fell out of it and then the citizens were quit of them. Never in their lives had the
