four o'clock in
the afternoon
The pieces of ground around them are also planted , like the others , with hemp and with sunflowers , but even these look less majestic , less prosperous than those which surround the houses higher up the streets ; their brown heads are smaller , more sparsely laden with the good oil-bearing seeds , and the stems of the hemp do not look as if they ever would make a thatch . The street itself is wide and a regular heat-trap in summer : in the autumn and the spring it is ankle-deep in mud , and of course in the winter it is buried in snow . But in the late summer it is at its best , one or two heavy showers of rain have laid the dust , and the sunflowers and dahlias round the little school-house and by the presbytery are very gay -- such a note of crude and vivid colour which even puts the decorated jars to shame . Also the sun has lost some of its unbearable heat ; after four o'clock in the afternoon it is pleasant to sit or stand outside one 's house for a bit of gossip with a neighbour . The brown-legged , black-eyed children , coolly clad in loose white shifts , bare-footed and bare-headed , can play outside now ; the little girls , with bright-coloured kerchiefs tied round their heads , and pink or blue petticoats round their waists , vie with the dahlias in hue . On Sunday afternoons it is cool enough to dance in Ignácz Goldstein 's barn . The black day in the calendar -- the fourteenth of September -- has come and gone , and the lads have gone with it : except for the weeping mothers and sweethearts the ordinary village life has resumed its peaceful course .