“The Lord favours those who are early to rise”

“The Lord favours those who are early to rise” is a familiar saying whose promise of reward becomes pointedly unstable in Lipce. The narrative applies it to Antek's Brother-in-law, who rises at any hour when money can be made, while elsewhere the village’s laborers face hunger and the Squire withholds the employment they had expected. Set against the proverb’s confidence in personal industry, these scenes ask who is actually able to turn effort into security—and who is left to suffer when work and aid are controlled by others.

The Saying and Its Irony

The proverb appears as the narrator reflects on Antek's Brother-in-law’s conduct while the old man lies sick. The saying seems, at first, to endorse the man’s readiness to work: he is willing to rise early, or even at midnight, and travel ten villages for profit. But the narrator immediately sharpens the contrast. His enterprise is directed toward making money, and his greed and stinginess distinguish him from a figure of simple diligence. The proverb’s apparent moral lesson is thus bent into irony: getting up early may serve the pursuit of profit without serving generosity or the common good.

That irony is made concrete in the household. As Hanka the Farmstead Keeper cares for the sick man, Antek's Brother-in-law and his wife repeatedly inspect the property, waiting to see whether the old man will speak and distribute it. They quarrel over objects as small as an old halter or plank, and Hanka has to watch what he takes. The proverb’s praise of energy therefore sits beside a scene of acquisitiveness, where effort is measured by what can be secured for oneself. It does not guarantee a just claim to another person’s possessions, nor does it make the household’s struggle over inheritance an act of mutual care.

Diligence Without Work

The proverb’s limits become more urgent in the account of Lipce’s hired laborers. At least twenty people are desperate for work, and winter has already damaged some households’ potato stores. With little money coming in, many face a lean preharvest season; some can afford a hot meal only once a day and go to bed hungry. They had expected the Squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide work for everyone. Instead, he refuses to hire a single man from Lipce, angered by a complaint lodged against him with the commissioner.

This reversal separates willingness to work from access to work. The proverb can sound as if effort reliably earns its reward, but the laborers’ circumstances show that their livelihood depends on decisions made by the Squire. Their poverty is not presented as laziness: the men are ready for employment, and the expected logging had offered a possible means of getting through winter and the preharvest shortage. The refusal makes early rising and personal industry insufficient where another party controls whether there is work at all.

From Private Maxim to Collective Grievance

The refusal also turns a dispute over employment into part of a wider grievance. In a public appeal, a speaker addresses farmers and hired hands together and recalls injuries, confiscations, unsuccessful court cases, and complaints that brought no remedy. The Squire is now felling the forest, the speech argues, while refusing the villagers employment; the crowd answers with calls to drive the workers off and stop the cutting. The proverb’s individual logic gives way to a collective question of rights and livelihood: the villagers claim that the forest is theirs, yet see it being cut down without their consent or benefit.

The concern for the poorest appears again in an account of households pushed toward destitution. A sick girl is found in a cold cottage where the windows are stuffed with straw, the family has run out of potatoes, and the quilt has been sold. Another woman has given birth while sick and without milk, while the fields stand fallow because the men who might work them are in prison. The speaker condemns farmers who attend to food, lending, and their own comfort while leaving the poor to divine care. In this wider moral landscape, the proverb is neither a solution nor a dependable law. Its ironic use exposes the gap between praising industry and creating the conditions in which labor can keep people fed; the passage instead makes the village’s unanswered need for work and assistance the measure of its social order.