The Rising came like happy tidings, like the cool breath of dawn, like a May-time shower:
Under a showery sky
Bloom wide the fields of rye,
Ever blue and chill
May will the granaries fill.
Formerly there were the village constable, the district clerk, trumperies, requisitions, and taxations; for then it was the gentry who were the guardians. But now, Yonov the One-Eyed croaked exultantly:
"Now it's ourselves! We ourselves! In our own way! In our own world!
The land is ours! We are the masters: it is the Rising! Our Rising!"
There were no storms that winter; it was cold and dark, and the wolf- packs were astir. One after another the inhabitants were stricken down with typhoid—it was with typhoid that they paid for the Rising! Half the village succumbed and was borne on the peasants' sleighs to the churchyard.
By Candlemas, when winter and summer meet, all the provisions were exhausted, and the villagers drove to the station. But even that had changed. New people congregated there, some shouting, others hurrying to and fro with sacks. The villagers returned with nothing and sat down to their potatoes.
In the spring prayers were offered up for the dead and a religious procession paraded round the village, the outskirts of which were bestrewn with ashes. Then the villagers started to take tar and bast shoes to the station; they wanted to sell them, and with the proceeds buy ploughshares, harrows, scythes, sickles, and leather straps. But they never reached the station.
Their way led them through fields all lilac-coloured in the glowing sun: there they encountered an honest peasant dressed in a short fur jacket and a cap beneath which his look was calm and grave.
He told them there was nothing at the station, that the townsfolk themselves were running like mice; and he urged them to go to Poriechie, to give Silvester the blacksmith some tar for his ploughshares, and, if he had none, to make them some of his own hand- ploughshares; then to go and sow flax. The towns were dying out. The towns were no more! It was the people's Rising, and they had to live as in the olden days: there were no towns then, and there was no need for them.
They turned back. To Poriechie for tar…. Silvester made them a hand-plough…. Grandfather Yonov the One Eyed stalked round the fields exhorting to sow: "We have to live by ourselves! Now we ourselves are the Masters! Ourselves alone! It is the Rising!"