divine providence, and we have two instructors with which few homes can be compared.
Staza took him with her to the cemetery, and there they beheld face to face the serious side of life. Frank took Staza into the fields and to the open wold, and they recognized the smiles of the green turf on the earth, the azure blue of the firmament of heaven, the laverock which fluttered like a singing messenger from one to the other.
Staza led Frank to the cemetery whenever a new grave was delved. There they heard from the lips of Bartos the life-history of the defunct, there they squatted together, slept side by side, and were “faithful little spirits”. Frank again reconducted Staza to the field when he found a new bird’s-nest, when he had discovered any young quails, or when he wished to show her how the partridges sit. Here again he narrated to her the whole life-history of these creatures, so far as he knew it, and when they sat by the hedgerow during the narration, it seemed to them like fairy-land.
Staza came for Frank whenever the bees winged their way to the clover which bloomed on his grandfather’s grave, in order, as she said, that Frank might see whether they were the bees from his grandfather’s hives. And then Frank sat beside his grandfather’s grave and Staza beside the grave of her mother, and they were at home.
Then again Frank led Staza to the farmstead, to those hives which were now his own, and they observed in which direction the bees flew away and whether they went to his grandfather’s grave. Then the two children settled themselves in the chambers by the coach-house, and burst into story-telling just as musicians bust forth into song and melody.
And to tell the truth, these two chambers at the Loykas’s farm seemed steeped in fairy-lore and ballad-history. He who stepped into them involuntarily remembered things which he had here heard from the musicians and from the kalounkar, and scarcely had he seated himself before it all seemed to come upon him so that he was compelled to relate it all again. Something of this kind Frank and Staza experienced when they went into the burial-ground and when they seated themselves in a fresh-dug grave. Even there on that little hillock into which the grave heaped some one seemed to sit with a harp and to softly sweep the strings.
