midday
The strawberries were ripening in the Przykop . The children from Starawies would go there to look for them , and when they had all been gathered it would be the time for mushrooms . But the village children did not like the gloom that reigned in the Przykop , they were accustomed to let the rays of the burning sun scorch their brown bodies a still darker brown amid the flat turnip fields and immense plains covered with corn , where there were no shadows to arrest its full force . The big pines commenced just at the back of Starydwór , and beyond those were the alders and willows , extending as far as the low-lying marshes , where the frogs croaked at night , the white water-lilies opened their golden calices at midday , and where towards evening the game from the royal forest in the blue distance beat a path through the rustling reeds on their way to quench their thirst at the pools . A long , long time ago the whole of the Przykop was said to have been an enormous lake , ten times as big as now . Now nothing remained of it but the basin in the centre , that deep depression which , so to speak , formed a hollow amid the yellow and green carpet of this fruitful corn-land . But at night , when the will-o ' - the-wisps wandered about the marshes and danced on the duckweed , in which a man could be swallowed up if he did not take care where he put his foot , the pious people -LSB- Pg 137 -RSB- would make the sign of the cross when they were obliged to pass that way .