up against the walls of the room.

After this there is beer for every one, the musicians included, and
the revelers take a long breath and prepare for the great event of the
evening, which is the acziavimas. The acziavimas is a ceremony which,
once begun, will continue for three or four hours, and it involves one
uninterrupted dance. The guests form a great ring, locking hands, and,
when the music starts up, begin to move around in a circle. In the
center stands the bride, and, one by one, the men step into the
enclosure and dance with her. Each dances for several minutes--as long
as he pleases; it is a very merry proceeding, with laughter and singing,
and when the guest has finished, he finds himself face to face with Teta
Elzbieta, who holds the hat. Into it he drops a sum of money--a dollar,
or perhaps five dollars, according to his power, and his estimate of
the value of the privilege. The guests are expected to pay for this
entertainment; if they be proper guests, they will see that there is a
neat sum left over for the bride and bridegroom to start life upon.

Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this
entertainment. They will certainly be over two hundred dollars and maybe
three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year's income
of many a person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work
from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a
quarter of an inch of water on the floor--men who for six or seven
months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till
the next Sunday morning--and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in
a year. There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can
hardly see the top of the work benches--whose parents have lied to get
them their places--and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars
a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such
a sum, all in a single day of your life, at a wedding feast! (For
obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your
own wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.)

It is very imprudent, it is tragic--but, ah, it is so beautiful! Bit by
bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this
they cling with all the power of their souls--they cannot give up the
veselija! To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to
acknowledge defeat--and the difference between these two things