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From an illustration by Michał Elwiro Andriolli (1881).</poem>]]
Let's start by saying a few words about the Tribune himself, one of the more colourful characters in ''Pan Tadeusz''. We don't know his first name, but we do know that his surname was Hreczecha (pronounced, very roughly: ''gretch-{{small|EH}}-hah''). "Tribune" (Polish "''wojski''", Latin "''tribunus''") was a medieval title, originally used by officials who took care of knights' wives and children while their husbands were away at war; in Hreczecha's case, it was an unofficial honorific awarded by the local gentry out of respect for the old man. A middle-income nobleman, also known as a ''grykosiej'', or "buckwheat-sower" (in fact, Hreczecha's own surname comes from "''hrechka''", the Belarusian word for buckwheat), even though he had his own estate (he could afford to give his younger daughter, Tekla, a village in dowry), he preferred to live, along with Tekla, in the household of Judge Soplica, his more affluent friend, distant relative and might-have-been son-in-law (the Judge, in his youth, had been engaged to Marta, the Tribune's elder daughter, but she died before the wedding and he never married anyone else). In Soplicowo, the Tribune had the role of a kind of seneschal, managing the Judge's domestic servants.
Earlier, the Tribune "with gentry had spent his life, eating, at assemblies, {{...}} or at council meeting",<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book V, verses 427–428</ref> were he mastered the ancient art of knife-throwing. But it was in the realm of hunting that the Tribune was considered a real expert. He had learned this skill as a young man serving at the court of Tadeusz Rejtan, a Polish national hero. But the Tribune remembered him not as a model patriot, but as a master hunter. As for his choice of game, he was prone to going for two extremes: on the one hand he believed that only large animals with horns, claws or fangs were worthy of being hunted by a nobleman. In his view, chasing hares was a good sport for youngsters and servants. "Hreczecha is my name – was his saying – since King Lech, it's no habit of a single Hreczecha to follow a rabbit."<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book I, verses 816–817</ref> On the other hand, he spent a lot time hunting flies. He would always carry a fly-swat around and, when mushrooming, he picked fly agarics, only to get rid of those pesky insects!