or the customer; if the latter had not the sense to see
it he was a fool and a pig, and some one else should work for him, not
Kurt Lieders, BEGEHR!

Young Lossing had learned the business practically. He was taught the
details by his father's best workman; and a mighty hard and strict
master the best workman proved! Lossing did not dream that the crabbed
old tyrant who rarely praised him, who made him go over, for the
twentieth time, any imperfect piece of work, who exacted all the artisan
virtues to the last inch, was secretly proud of him. Yet, in fact, the
thread of romance in Lieders's prosaic life was his idolatry of the
Lossing Manufacturing Co. It is hard to tell whether it was the Lossings
or that intangible quantity, the firm, the business, that he worshipped.
Worship he did, however, the one or the other, perhaps the both of them,
though in the peevish and erratic manner of the savage who sometimes
grovels to his idols and sometimes kicks them.

Nobody guessed what a blow it was to Kurt when, a year ago, the elder
Lossing had died. Even his wife did not connect his sullen melancholy
and his gibes at the younger generation, with the crape on Harry
Lossing's hat. He would not go to the funeral, but worked savagely, all
alone by himself, in the shop, the whole afternoon--breaking down at
last at the sight of a carved panel over which Lossing and he had once
disputed. The desolate loneliness of the old came to him when his old
master was gone. He loved the young man, but the old man was of his own
generation; he had "known how things ought to be and he could understand
without talking." Lieders began to be on the lookout for signs of waning
consideration, to watch his own eyes and hands, drearily wondering when
they would begin to play him false; at the same time because he was
unhappy he was ten times as exacting and peremptory and critical with
the younger workmen, and ten times as insolently independent with the
young master. Often enough, Lossing was exasperated to the point of
taking the old man at his word and telling him to go if he would, but
every time the chain of long habit, a real respect for such faithful
service, and a keen admiration for Kurt's matchless skill in his craft,
had held him back. He prided himself on keeping his word; for that
reason he was warier of using it. So he would compromise by giving the
domineering old fellow a "good, stiff rowing." Once, he coupled this
with a threat, if th