swiez, arranged that memorable feast the fame of which still lives
throughout Lithuania in popular tales.

What the Seneschal read, understood, and proclaimed, that straightway did
the skilful cooks carry out. The work seethed: fifty knives clattered on
the tables; scullions black as demons rushed about, some carrying wood,
others pails of milk and wine; they poured them into kettles, spiders, and
stew-pans, and the steam burst forth. Two scullions sat by the stove and
puffed at the bellows; the Seneschal, the more easily to kindle the fire,
had given orders to have melted butter poured on the wood--this bit of
extravagance is permitted in a well-to-do household. The scullions stuffed
bundles of dry brushwood into the fire; others of them placed upon spits
immense roasts of beef and venison, and haunches of wild boars and of
stags; still others were plucking whole heaps of birds of all sorts--
clouds of down flew about, and grouse, heath cocks, and hens were stripped
bare. But there were very few hens: since the attack that bloodthirsty
Buzzard Dobrzynski had made on the hencoop at the time of the foray, when
he had annihilated Zosia's establishment, without leaving a bit for
medicine,190 Soplicowo, once famous for its poultry, had not yet managed
to blossom out again with new birds. For the rest, there was a great
abundance of all the sorts of meats that could be gathered from the house
and from the butchers' shops, from the woods and from the neighbours, from
near and from far: you would have said that the only thing lacking was
bird's milk. The two things that a generous man requires in order to give
a feast were united at Soplicowo: plenty and art.

Already the solemn day of the Most Holy Lady of Flowers191 was
approaching; the weather was lovely, the hour early; the clear sky was
extended about the earth like a calm, hanging, concavo-convex sea. A few
stars shone from its depths, like pearls from the sea bottom, seen through
waves; on one side a little white cloud, all alone, drifted along and
buried its wings in the azure, like the vanishing pinions of a guardian
angel, who, detained through the night by the prayers of men, has been
belated, and is hastening to return to his fellow-denizens of heaven.

Already the last pearls of the stars had grown dim and been extinguished
in the depths of the sky, and the centre of the sky's brow was growing
pale; its right temple, reposing on a pillow of shadow, was still swart