ou've_ got no call to abuse decent people!"

"I'll knock in half a dozen of your teeth!"

"And I'll make you walk lame, my fine fellow. Bankrupt!"

Then the fight was on. After exhausting all the terms of abuse usual in
the locality, the imagination of both rascals would invent new ones of
the most audacious sort, until this capital too was used up, and the
two fighting-cocks would totter back to the house, exhausted and
embittered.

Neither had any dearer wish than to get the better of the other and
make him feel his superiority; but if Huerlin had the better brain, the
sailmaker was the more cunning--and since the weaver took no side,
neither could claim a real triumph over the other. Both longed ardently
to attain a position of superior consideration in the house; and they
employed for this purpose so much energy, caution, thought, and secret
obstinacy that with the half of these either of them, if he had put it
to use at the right time, might have kept his bark afloat instead of
becoming a Sun-Brother.

In the meantime the huge pile of wood in the yard had slowly become
smaller. What remained had been left for another time, and other
employments had been taken up. Heller sometimes worked by the day in
the mayor's garden, and Huerlin was occupied under the manager's
supervision in washing salad, picking lentils, shelling beans and the
like--tasks in which he was not required to overexert himself, and yet
could feel he was being useful. Under these conditions the feud between
the two brethren seemed slowly healing, since they never worked
together the whole day, and in their leisure hours each had enough to
complain of and to report. Each of them imagined, too, that he had been
selected for this particular work on account of special aptitudes which
gave him a certain superiority over the other. So the summer drew
along, until the leaves began to turn brown, and the evenings on which
one could do without a light until nine o'clock were no more.

At this time it happened to the manufacturer, as he was sitting alone
on the doorstep one afternoon and sleepily contemplating the world, to
see a strange young man come down the hill who asked the way to the
town hall. Huerlin was civil out of sheer boredom, went a couple of
streets with the stranger, answered his questions, and was presented
for his trouble with two cigars. He asked the next wagon-driver for a
light, lit one of them, and returned to his shady place on t