the town not one soul longing for the light—not one heart which throbbed for something more than his own wife, his own children, and before all, his own riches.

There was plenty of noise arising from the care and haste whose only aim was to gain money; there was darkness because of mystic fears and dreams there was narrowness and suffocating because of merciless, grinding, dead orthodoxy.

The common people of the same faith throughout the whole country considered the people of Szybow as powerful, both materially and morally, wise, orthodox, almost holy.

Over the whole deep-sunk social valley hung a cloud. This cloud was composed of the darkest elements which exist in human kind, which are: respect for the letter from which the spirit has departed, dense ignorance, suspicious and hateful defence of self against everything which flows from broad, sunny, but 'foreign' worlds.