"Vexes? No! Then I grow as savage as a tiger, and I ought not to be so,
I ought not. Roland, my foreman, probably likes—"
"Meister, Meister, your beard is beginning to tremble already!"
"What did the Glippers think, when their aristocratic cloaks—"
The landlord took yours and mine from the fire entirely on his own responsibility."
"I don't care! The crook-legged ape did it to honor the Spanish sycophant. It enraged me, it was intolerable."
"You didn't keep your wrath to yourself, and I was surprised to see how patiently the baron bore your insults."
"That's just it, that's it!" cried the fencing-master, while his beard began to twitch violently. "That's what drove me out of the tavern, that's why I took to my heels. That—that—Roland, my fore man."
"I don't understand you."
"Don't you, don't you? How should you; but I'll explain. When you're as old as I am, young man, you'll experience it too. There are few perfectly sound trees in the forest, few horses without a blemish, few swords without a stain, and scarcely a man who has passed his fortieth year that has not a worm in his breast. Some gnaw slightly, others torture with sharp fangs, and mine—mine.—Do you want to cast a glance in here?"
The fencing-master struck his broad chest as he uttered these words and, without waiting for his companion's reply, continued: