In the old country, the part of Poland that belonged to Austria in those days, there was a great baron who lived on an estate to which there was no end. No man in the nearby village had ever walked completely around it and nobody really knew where its boundaries lay. But there was one part of it that was surrounded by a high iron fence which had taken many years to build. Behind this fence were high trees and thick bushes and no one in the village could tell what lay beyond them. But it was assumed that the baron’s house was inside there somewhere. Who would build such a fine fence except around a fine house?

It was always quiet, however, beyond this fence; no people were ever heard talking beyond it, and no sounds of wagon wheels or scythes ever came over it. And then one day there was heard a great shouting and roaring inside the fenced acreage. The people of the village ran to the fence and some of them hoisted themselves over it and climbed the trees and looked inside. They saw peasants running toward a mired wagon, and they saw men with pikes and whips fighting them off. They saw a kind of battle going on, and the battle ended only when the men with the weapons were beaten to the ground. Then the peasants took the pikes from them and killed them all.

The whole story only came out later. What had happened was this. Inside the fence the baron kept several hundreds of serfs. The emancipation had been proclaimed generations before, but it had not penetrated many estates. The serfs were never let out of the estate and lived and died there never knowing the world outside. Then one day they were dragging this wagon along when its wheels sunk into the mud and refused to be pulled out. The overseer ordered them to pull harder, and finally raised his whip. As they pulled on the straps he brought the whip down on several of their backs. This was not unusual but it happened once too often, for this time the peasants dropped the straps and turned and looked at the overseer. Then they surrounded him and as he struck at them again and again with the whip, they took hold of his throat and broke his neck as he stood there. They let him go when he stopped flinging the whip and when they stepped away from him he fell to the ground and they saw he was dead.

There he was, dead, with the whip still in his hand. They did not know what to do, so they stood there waiting. For now their anger had cooled and they were waiting for someone to come and take the overseer’s place so that they could go on with the day’s work. After a few hours of waiting they saw another official and they called him over to tell him that they needed another overseer, because this one had fallen and broken his neck. The official looked at the dead man and saw, and he went back to the house. Then it was that this gang of overseers came charging down on the peasants with apparent intent to kill them.