with the other stroked his face and head. And this he did the whole time without speaking or making any other movement. Only Bartos had straitly charged the musicians in no way to recall his thoughts to his home.
When it seemed to Loyka that they had played long enough, he rose and said to the musicians very gravely, “I thank you, comrades, and as far as in me lies, I will requite you. But go not to our son’s farmstead, there I will never dwell again. I have determined to make a home just as the whim seizes me. Here I can invite you to me at any time. Here the people are good and honest, and no one says, ‘No! act differently.’ I have been too long at home, you know—on the farm, ’tis seldom I have quitted it, and so this has come to me that I must quit it; I must look about me and go a little into the world to learn how the world wags elsewhere.”
And more he said to the same effect. On this he departed from the village with Frank, the musicians following after him and playing through the village and even when the village was left behind And then they went into other villages, and there much the same occurred. Only that Loyka marched into those other villages at the head of a band of musicians, so that the village was immediately in an uproar, topsy-turvy, and with its feet in the air. People ran out of their houses on to the village green, gathered round him in a group, and said to one another, “It is Loyka from Frishets: he is pensioned off, and so, see! he has gone mad.”
Soon a rumour spread all through the countryside about Loyka, how that he walked from village to village with an escort of musicians, and scarcely had they finished saying so, when lo! Loyka announced himself by well-known strains of music. And when the people ran together on the village green and collected round him, he paused, and said, “Hearken to what I will preach unto you.”
On this he delivered a kind of sermon, showing forth how he had passed the night in sufferings, how he wandered with the moon, how that the moon wandered in the sky and he wandered in the world, and how he arose with the first dawn, and how the foxes had holes and he had not where to lay his head like the Son of Man.
He even walked about the market-places and spoke to people and implored them only not to send him home, and he would repay
