After this there is beer for every one, the musicians included, and the revelers take a long breath and prepare for the great event of the evening, which is the acziavimas.  The acziavimas is a ceremony which, once begun, will continue for three or four hours, and it involves one uninterrupted dance.  The guests form a great ring, locking hands, and, when the music starts up, begin to move around in a circle.  In the center stands the bride, and, one by one, the men step into the enclosure and dance with her.  Each dances for several minutes—­as long as he pleases; it is a very merry proceeding, with laughter and singing, and when the guest has finished, he finds himself face to face with Teta Elzbieta, who holds the hat.  Into it he drops a sum of money—­a dollar, or perhaps five dollars, according to his power, and his estimate of the value of the privilege.  The guests are expected to pay for this entertainment; if they be proper guests, they will see that there is a neat sum left over for the bride and bridegroom to start life upon.

Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment.  They will certainly be over two hundred dollars and maybe three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year’s income of many a person in this room.  There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor—­men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning—­and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in a year.  There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches—­whose parents have lied to get them their places—­and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it.  And then to spend such a sum, all in a single day of your life, at a wedding feast! (For obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your own wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.)

It is very imprudent, it is tragic—­but, ah, it is so beautiful!  Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls—­they cannot give up the veselija!  To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat—­and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.  The veselija has come down to them from a far-off time; and the meaning of it was that one might dwell within the cave and gaze upon shadows, provided only that once in his lifetime he could break his chains, and feel his wings, and behold the sun; provided that once in his lifetime he might testify to the fact that life, with all its cares and its terrors, is no such great thing after all, but merely a bubble upon the surface of a river, a thing that one may toss about and play with as a juggler tosses his golden balls, a thing that one may quaff, like a goblet of rare red wine.  Thus having known himself for the master of things, a man could go back to his toil and live upon the memory all his days.