women; they were especially troublesome to Zosia, beating against her face
and her bright eyes, which they mistook for two candles. In the air an
immense cloud of insects gathered and whirled about, playing like the
music of the spheres; Zosia's ear distinguished amid the thousand noises
the accord of the flies and the false half-tone of the mosquitoes.

In the fields the evening concert had hardly begun; the musicians were
just finishing the tuning of their instruments: already the land rail, the
first violin of the meadow, had shrieked thrice; already from afar the
bitterns seconded it with a bass boom below in the marshes; already the
woodcocks were rising up with whirling flight, uttering repeated cries, as
though they were beating on drums.

As a finale to the humming of the insects and the din of the birds there
resounded in a double chorus two ponds, like enchanted lakes in the
Caucasus mountains, silent through all the day and playing at evening. One
pond, which had clear depths and a sandy shore, gave forth from its blue
chest a gentle, solemn call; the other pond, with a muddy bottom and a
turbid throat, answered it with a mournfully passionate cry. In both ponds
sang countless hordes of frogs; the two choruses were attuned into two
great accords: one thundered fortissimo, the other gently warbled; one
seemed to complain, the other only sighed; thus the two ponds conversed
together across the fields, like two AEolian harps that play alternately.

The darkness was thickening; only in the woods and among the willows along
the streamlet the eyes of wolves shone like candles, and farther off, on
the narrowed borders of the horizon, here and there were the fires of
shepherds' camps. Finally the moon lighted her silver torch, came forth
from the wood, and illumined both sky and land. Now they both, half
uncovered from the darkness, slept side by side, like a happy married
pair; the heaven took into its pure arms the breast of the earth, which
shone silvery in the moonlight.

Now, opposite the moon, first one star and then another began to shine;
now a thousand of them, and now a million twinkled. Castor and his brother
Pollux glittered at their head, once called among the Slavs Lele and
Polele;139 now they have been christened anew in the people's zodiac; one
is called Lithuania and the other the Kingdom.140

Farther off glitter the two pans of the heavenly Scales. Upon them God on
the day of creation--as old me