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 would have beaten him to death, I believe, if the good Lord Himself hadn’t decided to take a hand in things, for once, during the execution of one of their fiendish orders of torture, the Director himself was struck by lightning. The Countess fainted dead away.”

“Well and what of it?” cynically asked young Nešněra. “Because my old folks were stubborn headed and didn’t understand what was to their own disadvantage, should we be so, too? If someone wants to buy my land and pays well, I can buy elsewhere and it’s just as good!”

The neighbors looked breathlessly at old Halama to hear what he would say to that. Some thought that young Nešněra was in the right, others felt, but could not express why they felt, he was wholly wrong.

Old Halama seemed to sense the gravity of the moment. He lost himself in thought for a while, appearing to look off into a corner somewhere and a considerable time elapsed before he spoke.

“You see, Joseph, these are things which are hard to explain by mere reasoning if the heart doesn’t listen. The right feeling has to be here under the vest. These are strange things. Perhaps a learned man could find the proper paragraph in books to cover the case, but I don’t know any more than the Ten Commandments and what I have written in my heart, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother’—and I do honor their work, their sufferings! They did not bequeath me very much, but I value it because it was inherited