It was still very quiet in the village. A cock crowed here
and there, and swallows flew chirping close to the ground, darting
swiftly about preparing for their higher flight. Janci the shepherd,
apparently the only human being already up, stood beside the brook
at the point where the old bridge spans the streamlet, still
turbulent from the mountain floods. Janci was cutting willows to
make his Margit a new basket.
Once the shepherd raised his head from his work, for he thought he
heard a loud laugh somewhere in the near distance. But all seemed
silent and he turned back to his willows. The beauty of the
landscape about him was much too familiar a thing that he should
have felt or seen its charm. The violet hue of the distant woods,
the red gleaming of the heather-strewn moor, with its patches of
swamp from which the slow mist arose, the pretty little village with
its handsome old church and attractive rectory--Janci had known it
so long that he never stopped to realise how very charming, in its
gentle melancholy, it all was.
Also, Janci did not know that this little village of his home had
once been a flourishing city, and that an invasion of the Turks
had razed it to the ground leaving, as by a miracle, only the church
to tell of former glories.
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