"Perhaps you are right."

But one day he said:

"What trash they are in the main, our employers—trash!"

When I remembered how and when my mother had uttered that word, I involuntarily drew back from him. He asked, smiling:

"Don't you think so?"

"I don't know."

"Well, they are; I can see that."

"But I like the master, anyhow."

"Yes, you are right; he is a worthy man, but strange."

I should have liked to talk with him about books, but it was plain that he did not care for them, and one day he advised me: