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.

The sun rose higher and higher. And now the village awoke to its
daily life. Voices of cattle and noises of poultry were heard
about the houses, and men and women began their accustomed round of
tasks. Janci found that he had gathered enough willow twigs by
this time. He tied them in a loose bundle and started on his
homeward way.

His path led through wide-stretching fields and vineyards past a
little hill, some distance from the village, on which stood a large
house. It was not a pleasant house to look at, not a house one
would care to live in, even if one did not know its use, for it
looked bare and repellant, covered with its ugly yellow paint, and
with all the windows secured with heavy iron bars. The trees that
surrounded it were tall and thick-foliaged, casting an added gloom
over the forbidding appearance of the house. At the foot of the
hill was a high iron fence, cutting off what lay behind it from
all the rest of the world. For this ugly yellow house enclosed
in its walls a goodly sum of hopeless human misery and misfortune.