g, swamp, or something of that nature; and he kept a tavern
in a wretched little market-town near the eastern frontier of Galicia--a
forlorn tavern, a forlorn tavern-keeper. Although always on the alert to
sell adulterated brandy to his neighbour, and to seize the opportunity
to lend him money on usury, he did not thrive: he was a coward of whose
timidity every one took advantage to make him disgorge his ill-gotten
gains. His creed consisted in three doctrines: he firmly believed that
the arts of lying well, of stealing well, and of receiving a blow in the
face without apparently noticing it, were the most useful arts to human
life; but, of the three, the last was the only one that he practised
successfully. His intentions were good, but his intellect deficient.
This arrant rogue was only a petty knave that any one could dupe.

Abel Larinski transported himself, in thought, to the tavern in which
Samuel Brohl had spent his first youth, and which was as familiar to him
as though he had lived there himself. The smoky hovel rose before him:
he could smell the odour of garlic and tallow; he could see the drunken
guests--some seated round the long table, others lying under it--the
damp and dripping walls, and the rough, dirty ceiling. He remembered a
panel in the wainscoting against which a bottle had been broken, in the
heat of some dispute; it had left a great stain of wine that resembled
a human face. He remembered, too, the tavern-keeper, a little man with a
dirty, red beard, whose demeanour was at once timid and impudent. He saw
him as he went and came, then saw him suddenly turn, lift the end of his
caftan and wipe his cheek on it. What had happened? An insolvent
debtor had spit in his face; he bore it smilingly. This smile was more
repulsive to Count Abel than the great stain that resembled a human
face.

"Children should be permitted to choose their fathers," he thought. And
yet this poor Samuel Brohl came very near living as happy and contented
in the paternal mire as a fish in water. Habit and practice reconcile
one even to dirt; and there are people who eat and digest it. What made
Samuel Brohl think of reading Shakespeare? Poets are corrupters.

The way it happened was this. Samuel had picked up, somewhere, a volume
which had dropped from a traveller's pocket. It was a German translation
of _The Merchant of Venice_. He read it, and did not understand it; he
reread it, and ended by understanding it. It produced a