"We're off! Good-by!" cheerily called out four sturdy, red-cheeked girls, early one morning. They were walking in pairs, with bundles in their hands and their shoes slung over their backs. They belonged to some of the poor families of the village, and intended tramping it to the richer plains to work on two of the farms there, where their help would be very welcome and well paid. Each had taken food for the journey; rye bread, bacon, and a cheese called brindza, made from sheeps' milk by Slovaks in the mountains.
Everybody waved to the girls or had a pleasant word for them as they passed by. When the last house had been reached, their voices rang out sweetly in song.
In vain is not thy toil,
In vain is not thy faith;
The Lord God in the Heavens
Gathers all of labor's sweat.
And again:
Songs, songs, whence come ye?
Descended from the heavens
Or grown in the woods?
Not down from the heavens
Nor grown in the woods,
But born in the hearts
Of maidens and youths.
Then the more melancholy strain:
My lips are singing,
My eyes are smiling,
But tears stream from my heart.
Ruzena half envied them as she listened. Everybody at her house, except her baby brother and herself, had left for the hay-field to help with the mowing. She had not yet taken the geese to pasture, and as she started off, brother tried to toddle after her.