How good the things did taste after the hard work! Ruzena helped her mother wait on the guests, and as a treat, was allowed to go with them to the tavern where they danced their own national dances until the church bell rang out midnight.
CHAPTER VI
VILLAGE INCIDENTS
"R-r-r-rub-rub-rub!" went the little drum beaten by the bailiff as he stalked through the village. Every one hurried to door or window to learn what the news might be. It would not have created much stir in a city, but it did create quite a stir in the double row of houses.
"Beran's cow, in your very next village," announced the bailiff, "stepped into a hole and broke her leg at noon to-day, so that she had to be killed. If you want fresh meat, here's your chance."
When the bailiff had gone from end to end of the street and back again shouting the news, he was surrounded by people anxious to know the particulars: just where the accident had occurred; how the cow happened to step into the hole; who first found it out; who killed her; and many other things.
Almost every one wanted some of the meat, and several of the men set out that very evening to secure a share.
The next day Ruzena drove the geese to pasture in the hay stubble where they were always taken that no grain might be wasted, when the hay was already in the barn waiting to be threshed. When she returned, she found that a wandering tinker with mousetraps, rolls of wire and mending material slung over his back, was making his yearly visit.
The tinker's native place, like that of many another Slovak tinker, was Kysuca, near the Silesian border. It was not from there, however, that he had just come, but from Nytra, a place of twelve thousand inhabitants, once the capital of the great Moravian Kingdom under Svatopluk, of which Slovakia was an important part. There was scarcely a door at which he did not stop, not merely to do some tinkering but to deliver messages from distant friends or relatives, or to relate what was going on in the greater world. He had been as far as Bohemia in his year's travels, and had much to say of that prosperous and progressive country. His opinions, though sometimes crude, were listened to with respect.