"What a fool's law you have in your country to let all men work with their hands! You have invented that in your stupidity. Do men work with their hands only? How do you suppose clever people work?"
But Iván said:
"How can we fools know? We labour mostly with our hands and with our backs."
"That is so, because you are fools. I will teach you," he said, "how to work with your heads. You will see that with your heads you can work faster than with your hands."
Iván marvelled.
"Indeed," he said, "we are called fools for good reason."
And the old devil said:
"But it is not easy to work with the head. You do not give me anything to eat because I have no calluses on my hands, and you do not know that it is a hundred times harder to work with the head. At times it just makes the head burst."
Iván fell to musing.
"But why do you torture yourself so much, my dear? It is no small matter to have your head burst. You had better do some easy work,—with your hands and back."