ouse-breaking are not so detestable! and no law against
it, no remedy, no mortal skill in the whole wide world."

The others had enough to do to tear the strong old man away from the
weakly stranger, on whom he wanted to take personal vengeance.

As Conrad could not get satisfaction in this way, he sat down on the
ground in a corner of the hut; and it being a holiday evening, the
journeymen lay down round about him, some trying to comfort him,
others jeering him. "Be pacified," said the man with one eye, "the
whole affair is mere child's play. Had the fire burnt out your eye,
had you had to endure unspeakable torments in your brain, and to toss
through sleepless feverish nights, then indeed you would have
something to complain of. But as it is, the whole matter is a sheer
trifle, and all fancy."

"That is your notion!" cried Conrad: "there never was a fool that
could not talk and chatter like one. Your having lost your eye in your
vocation is an honour to you, and you may be proud of it, and glory in
it. But their sticking me down in the middle of their dung, where I
was forced to lie like a tumble-down sheaf, or a truss of hay,--it has
knockt half a dozen nails into my coffin. 'Conrad! Conrad! ninnyhammer!
sack of straw!' so it seemed that everything was shouting in my ears.
I have now seen the miserable, dirty ploughed land, in which the
scurvy clowns have to breed up their bread. It's so flat down there,
you can see nothing, far as eye can reach; and one hears no
sledgehammers, no rush of waters, not even a boy pounding. It looks
just like the end of the world; and I could never have fancied that
the corn country and the plains, where more than half the world have
to live, were so utterly mean and despicable."

Thus they went on talking and squabbling, till some one for the sake
of starting another subject began telling about the robberies, which
their master, the old man of the mountain, was so incomprehensibly
allowing to go on, doing next to nothing to find out the offender,
although his losses, rich as he might be, must have amounted to very
large sums. The stranger miner again spoke of his contrivances for
making sure of catching the thief; and Conrad, who recollected the
former conversation, shook his fist at him in silence.

Eleazar seemed to enter into these strange schemes, and exulted with
vulgar glee at the thought of thus at length getting hold of the
rascal. As Edward eyed him in the dusky glare of