"As to the new ways of teaching,
I don't understand them. They ask the children, 'Who made the
table?'--just as if they didn't know that without teaching. And then
they give only the sounds of h, k, l, m, like the dumb, and the
alphabet's gone out of fashion entirely."

"Strict, you say?" interposed the new teacher, to avoid the shoals and
quicksands of a discussion.

"Yes. Of all the men running about the village now, there's not one who
hasn't had his good salting down from me many and many a time; and I
leave it to you whether they don't respect me to this day."

"Most certainly," responded the Jewish teacher, smiling. The old
gentleman went on:--"And when there's a festivity in the village it
won't do to play the gentleman of refinement and look on a while to see
how the ignorant vulgar amuse themselves; but you must go in and help
them. I've been the wildest among 'em all. The barber's dance they
learned from me, and the seven-league jump I always led them in, with
my Madge: my legs itch when I think of it."

"You were born and bred here, and had no need of establishing a
reputation."

"I was not born and bred here. All this country fell to Wurtemberg in
the year five: before that time it had belonged to Austria. I was born
at Freiburg."

"You have seen much of life?"

"I should think so. People that are thirty years old nowadays don't
know any thing of the world, for now every thing rolls as smoothly as a
tenpin-alley. I don't refer to you: but what can a teacher be expected
to know nowadays? Where has he been in the world? In books up to the
eyes. Every thing runs like clock-work now, and it's one, two, three,
pupil, student, teacher. I was a soldier, a musician, and a court
clerk, in the lands of many rulers. I have gone through with Russians,
and Frenchmen, and Saxons, and other deviltry. I began a copy-book
here, in the finest of German text; and when I'd got as far as F, down
came those lubberly Frenchmen, and they turned all our German text into
French; and there was an end of it."

Leaning on his hoe, he went on to tell the two grand stories of his
life,--the one of a pot containing two hundred florins, which he had
buried in the cellar, but which the French discovered notwithstanding,
and the other of how, on a bitter cold winter's day, he had gone with
the parson to Eglesthal to administer extreme unction to an old woman,
and they were met by a Cossack, who relieved the teacher of his mittens