What will happen next, what will happen to me or to her, I cannot say.  My life might have run on quietly towards that ocean where all life is absorbed,—­now it may run like a cataract down to a precipice.  Let it be so.  At the worst I can only be a little more unhappy, that is all.  Until now I have not been lying on a bed of roses, with that consciousness of my useless life continually before me.

I do not remember; somebody, was it my father? said that there must always be something growing within us, that such is the law of nature.  It is true.  Even in the desert the forces of life hidden in the depth bring forth palms in the oasis.

21 April.

I live nominally at Warsaw, but have spent four consecutive days at Ploszow.  Pani Celina is better, but the cleric Latyzs died the day before yesterday.  Doctor Chwastowski says it was a splendid case of pulmonary consumption, and with difficulty conceals his satisfaction that he foretold the exact course of the disease up to the last hour.  We had been to see the young man twelve hours before he died.  He was quite merry with us, and full of hope because the fever had left him, which was only a sign of weakness.  Yesterday, when sitting with Aniela on the veranda, the cleric’s mother came up to tell us about his death, in her own quaint way, in which sorrow blended with quiet submission to the inevitable.  In my pity for her, there was a great deal of curiosity, for up to now I had not much occasion to see anything of the inner life of the peasants.  What quaint expressions they use!  I tried to remember her words in order to note them down.

She embraced my knees, then Aniela’s, after which she put the outside of her hands over her eyes, and began to wail:  “O little Jesus, dear—­O Maria, holiest of Virgins!  He is dead, my poor lamb, dead!  He was eager to see the Lord face to face; more eager than to stop with his little father and mother!  Nothing could hold him back, not even the ladies’ cares!  Wine he had in plenty, and good food, and that could not save him; O little Jesus, dear!  O holiest of Virgins!  O Jesus mine!”

In her voice there was certainly a mother’s sorrow! but what struck me most was the modulation of the voice, as if set to some local music.  I never heard before the peasants lament their dead, but I am quite sure they all do it in more or less the same way, as if according to certain rules.

Tears were trembling on Aniela’s eyelashes, and with that peculiar goodness only women are capable of, she began to inquire into the details of his death, guessing that it would soothe the poor woman to speak about it.

And in fact she began at once most eagerly:—­