The long village-street was empty. Here and there an old woman appeared in the doorway of one of the low straw-roofed huts, or a few half-naked children played behind the tangled hedges in the neglected gardens; every one else had gone to the fields, for this was the first day of the rye-harvest.
The village-street was empty, and the swallows had free course. Up and down they moved in their arrowlike flight, now on the ground, now rising in graceful circles, straight lines, or zig-zag course, chirping, twittering, and unweariedly fluttering their slender wings.
Gotthold paused, pushed back his hat, which he had drawn over his eyes, and gazed as if absorbed in thought at the graceful little creatures, which he had loved from his earliest childhood. While he stood watching them, the angry displeasure roused by the Pastor's words gradually yielded to a strange melancholy.
"What the swallow sang, what the swallow sang," he murmured. "Yes, yes, it echoes through the village just as it did then:--
When I went away, when I went away,
I left well-filled chests behind,
But returning to-day, but returning to-day,
Naught I find.
"I thought I understood it--but I had only read it with my eyes, not my heart, the heart of a lonely man, who after an absence of ten years returns to the sacred scenes of his youth to find what I have found to-day--the most painful memory of that which was once mine."
Up and down flew the swallows, now close to the earth, and now in a lofty curve over a loaded harvest-wagon which had turned into the principal street from an adjoining lane, and disappeared in a barn.