s,
where the frogs croaked at night, the white water-lilies opened their
golden calices at midday, and where towards evening the game from the
royal forest in the blue distance beat a path through the rustling
reeds on their way to quench their thirst at the pools. A long, long
time ago the whole of the Przykop was said to have been an enormous
lake, ten times as big as now. Now nothing remained of it but the basin
in the centre, that deep depression which, so to speak, formed a hollow
amid the yellow and green carpet of this fruitful corn-land. But at
night, when the will-o'-the-wisps wandered about the marshes and danced
on the duckweed, in which a man could be swallowed up if he did not
take care where he put his foot, the pious people [Pg 137] would make
the sign of the cross when they were obliged to pass that way. For the
will-o'-the-wisps were the souls of those who could not find peace in
the grave.

Rosa Tiralla much preferred the Przykop to the bare fields. If she
stood at the farm gate and looked across the fields she could see the
whole way to Starawie['s], the path she took to school every day, the
wooden church tower and the cottage roofs covered with moss, that
almost disappeared from view behind the pale, waving corn when it stood
high. But from her bedroom window at the back of the house, she could
look into the Przykop, where the dark trees rustled so strangely.

The white-faced child felt the mystery of the morass just as much as
the brown-skinned children from Starawie['s]; but while it terrified
them, it attracted her. How beautiful to be in the deep, cool shade
when the sun was scorching outside. There was always a soft twilight
under the trees, and when the light fell through the interlaced
branches on the damp, green moss, it was no longer cruel, it was
transfigured.

Even as a small child Rosa Tiralla had often been in the Przykop. Her
nurse had always taken her there, for the wind, which swept across the
plain endangering the life of the delicate child, was hardly felt
there. The trees in the hollow were so well protected by the rising
ground that only their tops rustled slightly in the wind. Rosa very
often lifted the rusty latch of the gate that separated the morass from
the little garden at the back of Starydwor. "How lovely the mountains
and valleys of the Przykop were," thought the child of the plain. In
her eyes the slight incline down which she used to glide was a deep,
deep valley,