But Horodelski did not listen, and continued:
"Yes, it may very possibly be that I shall give up shoemaking, if only for as long as I stay with the clerk. I shall leave it just because this shoemaker has made it as clear as day to me that I am no good at my trade, and can only be assistant to a bungling clerk."
Pan Józef tittered, highly pleased, and was just preparing to answer suitably, when a grave bass voice interrupted him.
"You may go to the clerk or not, but you'll never be a shoemaker."
The bass voice came from a dark corner of the same room. I therefore looked more attentively in that direction.
On a low plank bed, with his head bent forward, and emptying his pipe, sat a stalwart peasant, known as Bartek the Shepherd.
"Why not?" I asked, greeting the speaker.
"Why not?" Bartek answered. "Because no one can escape his destiny. A dog can't become a bitch, nor a woman a man."
"That is quite a different matter."
"So you'd think; but it's really all the same. Take me, for example. No one could say of me that I'm work-shy, yet nothing I have to do with ever comes off. And why?—Why? Because I'm not at my own work. So though I work and don't drink, I'm wasting like sheep in rough weather. I'm already more like a dog at a fair than a man,—only there's no fair. I saw that from the moment I came here. For isn't it a queer thing that a land like this, with rivers like the sea, mountains as big as the Łysia Góra at home, meadows with grass up to your middle, should have no sheep! Our shepherds are wise men; they can bewitch you and free you from spells, and have remedies for this and that; yet if you told them that in all this big country there are no sheep, they wouldn't believe you."