"Yes, I'm coming out d'rectly. Take a boy with you to hold the sorrel: he won't fall into the harness well."
"Oh, never you mind: I'll look out for all that," said the ploughman, walking away heavily. The teacher shook his head.
Agnes cleared the table, and hastened to the kitchen to exchange notes with the hired girls about the stranger.
"A good-looking chap enough," said Legata, the oldest, Agnes' special confidant. "He looked at you: I didn't know whether he wanted to give you a kiss or a slap. Wouldn't he do for you? He's a single man."
"I'd rather be single myself till a cow's worth a copper."
"You're right," said another girl: "why, he feeds himself with both hands. Did you mind how he held the knife in his right hand and his fork in his left? Who ever saw an honest man doing the like of that?"
Until a very short time ago not only the peasantry, but all classes, of Germany, ate with the fork alone, which they held in the right fist and handled like a shovel.
"Yes," said a third: "he never got outside of his father's dunghill before, I bet you. He cut the dumplings with his knife, instead of pulling them to pieces; so they got as tough as tallow. Served him right, for a tallow-head as he is. He gulped at 'em till I thought he'd choke."
While the girls were thus washing the dishes and overhauling the guest, the conversation in the room had taken a turn not calculated to remove the unfavorable impressions already produced on the teacher's mind.
"By your talk," said Buchmaier, "I should judge you were raised in the lowlands."