The woman and Ivan exchanged a look as if deliberating together what answer they should give, and then the woman hastily replied:
"He went away of his own accord; the business is a pretty one, but he got disgusted with it."
"Oh—ho! what a rum 'un the fellow must have been. And has he a better time of it now?"
"I don't know," replied the virago defiantly. "It is not my business to find out what has become of my discharged apprentices. He got sick of this trade and took to another—that is the whole thing."
"You are quite right, my pretty dame, not everyone is fit for this business. A man must have a natural liking for it. I, for instance, would never take as an apprentice a man who had not spent some time in a dungeon, or cooled his heels in jail two or three times running in five or six years, for all the others are for ever wishing themselves back in polite society, and want to live in town. And then, too, they are always sighing and groaning and trying to make out that they are too good for the business. I don't like such people myself. Those who are likely to excel in this business show their teeth betimes. Those children who put out the eyes of birds, nail bats to barn doors, and love to shoot at little dogs, those are the sort of fellows from which apt pupils can be trained."
"That is quite true. Why you, yourself, must be the son of a headsman, or else you would not know all the conditions of the trade so well."
"You've hit it, that is just what I am. My father was an executioner and my grandfather before him, the business has steadily descended from father to son."
"Where do you live then?"
"In Poland. Rochow is where my father dwells. You must have guessed already from my accent that I was a Pole."
"Yes, and from your face too."