green, fragrant growth around the house there is a sure
refuge for beasts and men. Often a hare, caught among the cabbages, leaps
to find surer hiding in the hemp than in the shrubbery, for among the
close-set stalks no greyhound can catch it, nor foxhound smell it out
because of the strong odour. In the hemp a serving man, fleeing from the
whip or the fist, sits quietly until his master has spent his wrath. And
often even runaway peasant recruits, while the government is tracking them
in the woods, are sitting in the hemp. And hence at the time of battles,
forays, and confiscations, each side uses immense exertions to occupy a
position in the hemp, which commonly extends forward to the walls of the
mansion, and backward until it joins the hop fields, and thus covers their
attack and retreat from the enemy.

Protazy, though a bold fellow, felt some terror, for the very smell of the
leaves called to his mind various of his former adventures as
apparitor--one after another--of which the hemp had been a witness: how once
a gentleman of Telsze, Dzindolet, whom he had summoned to court, had put a
pistol against his breast, and bidden him crawl under the table and from
there bark out a recantation of that summons with a dog's voice,111 so
that the Apparitor had to run full speed for the hemp; how later
Wolodkowicz,112 a haughty and insolent grandee, who used to break up
district diets and violate courts of justice, receiving his official
summons, had torn it into bits, and stationing footmen with clubs at the
doors, had with his own hand held a bare sword over the Apparitor's head,
crying: "Either I will cut you down or you will eat your paper." The
Apparitor, like a cautious man, had pretended to begin to eat it, until,
stealing up to the window, he had plunged into the hemp garden.

To be sure, at this time it was no longer the custom in Lithuania to
defend oneself from a summons with the sabre or the whip, and an apparitor
only got cursed now and then for his pains; but Protazy could not know of
that change of customs, for it was long since he had carried any summons.
Though he was always ready, though he himself had begged the Judge to let
him, up till now the Judge, from a due regard for his advanced age, had
refused his requests; to-day he had accepted his offer because of pressing
need.

The Apparitor gazed and listened--all was quiet--slowly he thrust forward
his hand through the hemp, and, separating the dense mass