Vestec is a large village and has a church and school also. Near the church is the parsonage; beside it the sexton’s house. The mayor also lives in the center of the community. On the very edge of the hamlet stands the little cottage of the village herdsman. Beyond the cottage extends a long valley surmounted on both sides by hills grown over mainly with pines. Here and there is a clearing or green meadow with sparsely growing white-barked, bright-leaved birches, those maidens of the tree world which nature had permitted to grow there to cheer up the dismal pines and fire and the somber oaks and beeches. In the middle of the valley among the meadows and fields flowed a river directly past the herdsman’s cottage. On its banks at this point grew an alder and a willow.
The village herdsman was called Jacob and, lived with his daughter, Bára, in the last cottage. Jacob was in his sixties and Bára was his first-born and only child. To be sure he had wished for a son to inherit his name, but when Bára grew older he did not regret that she was a girl. She was dearer to him than a son and many
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