CHAPTER VIII.
The day after their arrival at Bogdanets Matsko and Zbyshko began to look around at their old seat, and soon saw that Zyh spoke correctly when he said that privations not a few would annoy them at first.
In the land management matters moved after a fashion. A few acres were worked by old-time men, or those settled in recently by the abbot. Formerly there had been far more cultivated land in Bogdanets, but from the period when the race of "the Grady" perished to the second last man in the battle of Plovtsi there was a lack of working-hands, and after the attack of the Silesian Germans and the war of the Grymaliti with the Nalenchi, the fields of Bogdanets, formerly fruitful, had grown over for the greater part with forests. Matsko could do nothing unaided. In vain had he tried some years before to attract free cultivators from Kresnia and give them land beyond the meadows, but these preferred to sit on their own "small plots" to working large fields owned by other men. He enticed in, however, some homeless people, and in various wars seized a few prisoners, whom he had married and then settled in cottages; in this way the village began to increase anew.
But Matsko met difficulty in management; hence, when a chance to pledge the place offered itself, he mortgaged all Bogdanets quickly, thinking first, that it would be easier for the rich abbot to manage the land, and second, that war would help Zbyshko and him to men and to money.
The abbot had worked indeed actively. He had increased the laboring force in Bogdanets by five families; he had increased the herds of horses and cattle; besides, he had built a granary, a brush cow-house, and also a stable of similar material. But, as he was not living in Bogdanets permanently, he had not thought of a house, and Matsko, who had supposed sometimes that when he came back he would find a castle surrounded by a moat and a palisade, found all as he had left it,—with this difference only, that the corners of the house had grown a little crooked and the walls appeared lower, for they had settled and sunk in the earth somewhat.
The house was composed of an enormous front room, two
