undred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been a hunting
preserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants settled in it,
holding title from ancient times; and one of these was Antanas Rudkus,
who had been reared himself, and had reared his children in turn, upon
half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst of a wilderness. There
had been one son besides Jurgis, and one sister. The former had been
drafted into the army; that had been over ten years ago, but since that
day nothing had ever been heard of him. The sister was married, and her
husband had bought the place when old Antanas had decided to go with his
son.

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a
horse fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get
married--he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into;
but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than
the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the
face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to
him for his wife--and offering his father's two horses he had been sent
to the fair to sell. But Ona's father proved as a rock--the girl was yet
a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in
that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and
summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest
was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight's
journey that lay between him and Ona.

He found an unexpected state of affairs--for the girl's father had died,
and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis' heart leaped as he
realized that now the prize was within his reach. There was Elzbieta
Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona's stepmother, and
there were her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother
Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were
people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the
woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did
not know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was
adrift--all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles
which is half as many dollars. They would have had three times that, but
it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and it had
cost the balance to get him to change his decision.

Ona might have married and left them, b