Little Ona is too excited to eat.  Once in a while she tastes a little something, when Cousin Marija pinches her elbow and reminds her; but, for the most part, she sits gazing with the same fearful eyes of wonder.  Teta Elzbieta is all in a flutter, like a hummingbird; her sisters, too, keep running up behind her, whispering, breathless.  But Ona seems scarcely to hear them—­the music keeps calling, and the far-off look comes back, and she sits with her hands pressed together over her heart.  Then the tears begin to come into her eyes; and as she is ashamed to wipe them away, and ashamed to let them run down her cheeks, she turns and shakes her head a little, and then flushes red when she sees that Jurgis is watching her.  When in the end Tamoszius Kuszleika has reached her side, and is waving his magic wand above her, Ona’s cheeks are scarlet, and she looks as if she would have to get up and run away.

In this crisis, however, she is saved by Marija Berczynskas, whom the muses suddenly visit.  Marija is fond of a song, a song of lovers’ parting; she wishes to hear it, and, as the musicians do not know it, she has risen, and is proceeding to teach them.  Marija is short, but powerful in build.  She works in a canning factory, and all day long she handles cans of beef that weigh fourteen pounds.  She has a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks.  When she opens her mouth, it is tragical, but you cannot help thinking of a horse.  She wears a blue flannel shirt-waist, which is now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time.  As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant, the three musicians follow her, laboriously and note by note, but averaging one note behind; thus they toil through stanza after stanza of a lovesick swain’s lamentation:—­

     “Sudiev’ kvietkeli, tu brangiausis;
     Sudiev’ ir laime, man biednam,
     Matau—­paskyre teip Aukszcziausis,
     Jog vargt ant svieto reik vienam!”

When the song is over, it is time for the speech, and old Dede Antanas rises to his feet.  Grandfather Anthony, Jurgis’ father, is not more than sixty years of age, but you would think that he was eighty.  He has been only six months in America, and the change has not done him good.  In his manhood he worked in a cotton mill, but then a coughing fell upon him, and he had to leave; out in the country the trouble disappeared, but he has been working in the pickle rooms at Durham’s, and the breathing of the cold, damp air all day has brought it back.  Now as he rises he is seized with a coughing fit, and holds himself by his chair and turns away his wan and battered face until it passes.