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 “Well, is it to your disadvantage that you know German?” Joseph turned on Vavřík.

“No. It’s good to know languages, and the more a person knows the better it is for him. But, for all that, I’m not going to send my children to a German school. No—not for anything! Time enough to learn it when they grow up and go among people as I did. And for that matter, I never studied it. In extreme cases one needs it in trading. But a German school? It isn’t that the German teacher instructs in the language but that he teaches the children to think and feel like Germans. And do you know what that means? You don’t, but I’ll tell you. It means that some day your boy will be ashamed of his father and of his language and will probably spit upon your grave because he didn’t have a better father.”

“Ho! ho! ho! It surely won’t be quite so bad as that,” Jachymek checked him. “You’re just saying that because you envy Nešněra since he is to have a neat profit, and not you. What kind of misfortune is a German school? It doesn’t mean that you’ll all have to become Germans and even though it did what of it? The master wants it because he is a master and a good one. Why didn’t some Czech build us a factory here?”

“And so you’re going to kiss his hand because he pays you your well-earned wages?”

“That I will, if the time comes!”

“And you don’t realize, do you, that that same