– 1 –

Hardly had she drawn the ragged cover back from her dust-gray hair, her frozen, mournful brow, and her eyes in which the ember of life was dying down, than she felt a strange wakefulness such as she had not enjoyed since a far, far distant time. When she raised her head a little from the pillow, the farm appeared to her bathed in the shadows of sunset: the huts scattered on the slopes of the valley, the clouds racing across the expanse of the sky, and the blackbird flitting from cloud to cloud and from hut to hut, as though with every flight it dyed its wings a new color, and as though its wings furnished the breeze with song — all the confid-ings, all the words it held — until the murmur in the hut that sheltered her became murmurs, and the whisper in her wandering depths became whispers, and her lips parted in something like lament or song, her head grown heavy and sinking back upon the pillow:

"O bird..."

She wished her lips would obey her, to sing or to lament; but she left that to two eyes that began melting down her withered cheeks, and to a heart that went on beating in her broken breast:

– 2 –

"O bird... O blackbird... dearest of all blackbirds and birds! Why do you call at every hut but my wretched hut?!...

Is this the faithfulness of friends, that you pass me

by only as the clouds pass across the expanse of the sky, when I have known you to hover about the hut, and peer in at the little window, and warble every evening?!...

Have you forgotten what there was between us in days gone by? Have you forgotten our evening walks to the field and our morning walks back from the field?! Have you forgotten my songs for you and your warblings for me?

Have you forgotten that day... those days, rather... Have you forgotten?.. Have you forgotten?!...

Forget, if you will, blackbird, or do not forget; but I, for all that, remember everything, my old friend:

It is as though I see you now, circling in the sky of this farm as you used to circle in the sky of the village years and years ago, your warbling tinted with the tint of your wings — in it the blue of the sky, the red of the twilight, and the green of the field, just as they are in those wings — so that I seem now to be in the field, the world at day's end and night's beginning,

the village looming from afar behind the furrows and the grasses and the trees, while I tramp barefoot along the parting of the grass, my hair bound up and my sleeves rolled back, the sickle in my right hand, my loose apron gathered over some greens with my left, calling out to you and listening for your warbling, almost flying to you for lightness — but I fell near the river, and my feet sank in the mud, and my dress got wet, and my hands were soiled, and the sickle went down into the water,