two ponds conversed together across the fields, like two Æolian harps that play alternately.
The darkness was thickening; only in the woods and among the willows along the streamlet the eyes of wolves shone like candles, and farther off, on the narrowed borders of the horizon, here and there were the fires of shepherds' camps. Finally the moon lighted her silver torch, came forth from the wood, and illumined both sky and land. Now they both, half uncovered from the darkness, slept side by side, like a happy married pair; the heaven took into its pure arms the breast of the earth, which shone silvery in the moonlight.
Now, opposite the moon, first one star and then another began to shine; now a thousand of them, and now a million twinkled. Castor and his brother Pollux glittered at their head, once called among the Slavs Lele and Polele;139 now they have been christened anew in the people's zodiac; one is called Lithuania and the other the Kingdom.140
Farther off glitter the two pans of the heavenly Scales. Upon them God on the day of creation—as old men say—weighed in turn the earth and all the planets before he set the burden of them in the abysses of the air; then he hung up in heaven the gilded scales: on these men have modelled their balances and scale pans.
To the north shines the circle of the starry Sieve,141 through which God, as they say, gifted grains of corn, when he cast them down from heaven for Adam our father, who had been banished for his sins from paradise.
Somewhat higher, David's Car,142 ready for mounting, turns its long pole towards the north star. The old Lithuanians know, concerning this chariot, that the populace err in calling it David's, since it is the Angel's
