Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/247

 me unfit for military service on account of a congenital weakness. I ran out of the room; in the passage I burst into tears; I wept as though my heart were breaking. I could have beaten my father and mother who had made me a cripple at birth.

Work seemed to me more useless than ever. I argued that if my parents were responsible for my being born a cripple, it was also their duty to make up to me for the happiness which had slipped through my fingers. I was quite clear on this point, that they were under obligation to me, not I to them.

But far from honouring these obligations, my father apprenticed me to a bricklayer, after I had firmly refused to re-enter the torture-chamber of the school.

It so happened that my master put me to work at a new house which was being built close to the barracks of the cadet corps. My imagination was busy all the time with drilling, fixing bayonets, and attacking the enemy with my companies. And here I was, having to hand bricks, and fetch tobacco for a drunken foreman. I had thoughts of jumping into the Moldavia.

At last my parents realized that this state of things was unbearable. They took me