spoke almost majestically, raising himself earnestly from the bench,—“your aged father, grown gray in honest toil, is speaking to you. I, too, might have had an easier living. Temptation came to me, also, but when I saw you growing up into such a fine, stalwart youth, I said to myself, ‘No, the Nešněras must not die out here on this land of my fathers! Look, you could cut into this palm of mine, so hardened it is by labor. And for whom? For you and yours! And why? Because this land is sacred to me, because I know how my father and grandfather toiled here. That was in the times when the overlord’s feudal lash hissed over them. This piece of land, because it lay so close to the castle, always pierced the eyes of the nobles. They wanted to buy us out—drive us away from here. Much blood our fathers shed, but they did not yield a single span of the land.—And see, Joseph, it was only in that way that we have preserved our Czech nation by defending every inch of our native land in a tooth and nail struggle against our enemy! To-day the nation extols us. Yes, in a thousand years they will still bless us that we—simple peasants and cottagers devoting our lives lovingly to our soil—preserved the land untainted for our children!
Wonderfully touching, yes, even terrible was the look on the grandfather’s face as he stood there livid, the muscles of his face torn, his gray hair disarranged and pasting itself on his forehead with the perspiration that poured from him. The two boys looked in terror
