I was soon to learn what being “sent into the yard” meant. Within a week that destiny was mine. Being so sent was the phrase for being charged to count the staves as they arrived in wagon-loads from Hungary,—oaken staves being the chief “industry” of Fiume, and the principal source of Herr Oppovich's fortune.

My companion, and, indeed, my instructor in this intellectual employment, was a strange-looking, dwarfish creature, who, whatever the season, wore a suit of dark yellow leather, the jerkin being fastened round the waist by a broad belt with a heavy brass buckle. He had been in the yard three-and-forty years, and though his assistants had been uniformly promoted to the office, he had met no advancement in life, but was still in the same walk and the same grade in which he had started.

Hans Sponer was, however, a philosopher, and went on his road uncomplainingly. He said that the open air and the freedom were better than the closeness and confinement within-doors, and if his pay was smaller, his healthier appetite made him able to relish plainer food; and this mode of reconciling things—striking the balance between good and ill—went through all he said or did, and his favorite phrase, “Es ist fast einerley,” or “It comes to about the same,” comprised his whole system of worldly knowledge.

If at first I felt the occupation assigned to me as an insult and a degradation, Hanserl's companionship soon reconciled me to submit to it with patience. It was not merely that he displayed an invariable good-humor and pleasantry, but there was a forbearance about him, and a delicacy in his dealing with me, actually gentlemanlike. Thus, he never questioned me as to my former condition, nor asked by what accident I had fallen to my present lot; and, while showing in many ways that he saw I was unused to hardship, he rather treated my inexperience as a mere fortuitous circumstance than as a thing to comment or dwell on. Han-serl, besides this, taught me how to live on my humble pay of a florin and ten kreutzers—about two shillings—daily. I had a small room that led out into the yard, and could consequently devote my modest salary to my maintenance. The straitened economy of Hans himself had enabled him to lay by about eight hundred florins, and he strongly advised me to arrange my mode of life on a plan that would admit of such a prudent saving.

Less for this purpose than to give my friend a strong proof of the full confidence I reposed in his judgment and his honor, I confided to his care all my earnings, and only begged he would provide for me as for himself; and thus Hans and I became inseparable. We took our coffee together at daybreak, our little soup and boiled beef at noon, and our potato-salad, with perhaps a sardine or such like, at night for supper; the “Viertelwein”—the fourth of a bottle—being equitably divided between us to cheer our hearts and cement good-fellowship on certainly as acrid a liquor as ever served two such excellent ends.

None of the clerks would condescend to know us. Herr Fripper, the cashier, would nod to us in the street, but the younger men never recognized us at all, save in some expansive moment of freedom by a wink or a jerk of the head. We were in a most subordinate condition, and they made us feel it.

From Hans I learned that Herr Oppovich was a widower with two children, a son and a daughter. The former was an irreclaimable scamp and vagabond, whose debts had been paid over and over again, and who had been turned out of the army with disgrace, and was now wandering about Europe, living on his father's friends, and trading for small loans on his family name. This was Adolph Oppovich. The girl—Sara she was called—was, in Hanserl's judgment, not much more to be liked than her brother. She was proud and insolent to a degree that would have been remarkable in a princess of a reigning house. From the clerks she exacted a homage that was positively absurd. It was not alone that they should always stand uncovered as she passed, but that if any had occasion to address her he should prelude what he had to say by kissing her hand, an act of vassalage that in Austria is limited to persons of the humblest kind.

“She regards me as a wild beast, and I am therefore spared this piece of servitude,” said Hans; and he laughed his noiseless uncouth laugh as he thought of his immunity.

“Is she handsome?” asked I.

“How can she be handsome when she is so overbearing?” said he. “Is not beauty gentleness, mildness, softness? How can it agree with eyes that flash disdain, and a mouth that seems to curl with insolence? The old proverb says, 'SchÖnheit ist Sanftheit;' and that's why Our Lady is always so lovely.”

Hanserl was a devout Catholic; and not impossibly this sentiment made his judgment of the young Jewess all the more severe. Of Herr Oppovich himself he would say little. Perhaps he deemed it was not loyal to discuss him whose bread he ate; perhaps he had not sufficient experience of me to trust me with his opinion; at all events, he went no further than an admission that he was wise and keen in business,—one who made few mistakes himself, nor forgave them easily in another.

“Never do more than he tells you to do, younker,” said Hans to me one day; “and he 'll trust you, if you do that well.” And this was not the least valuable hint he gave me.

Hans had a great deal of small worldly wisdom, the fruit rather of a long experience than of any remarkable gift of observation. As he said himself, it took him four years to learn the business of the yard; and as I acquired the knowledge in about a week, he regarded me as a perfect genius.

We soon became fast and firm friends. The way in which I had surrendered myself to his guidance—giving him up the management of my money, and actually submitting to his authority as though I were his son—had won upon the old man immensely; while I, on my side,—friendless and companionless, save with himself,—drew close to the only one who seemed to take an interest in me. At first,—I must own it,—as we wended our way at noon towards the little eating-house where we dined, and I saw the friends with whom Hans exchanged greetings, and felt the class and condition he belonged to reflected in the coarse looks and coarser ways of his associates, I was ashamed to think to what I had fallen. I had, indeed, no respect nor any liking for the young fellows of the counting-house. They were intensely, offensively vulgar; but they had the outward semblance, the dress, and the gait of their betters, and they were privileged by appearance to stroll into a cafÉ and sit down, from which I and my companion would speedily have been ejected. I confess I envied them that mere right of admission into the well-dressed world, and sorrowed over my own exclusion as though it had been inflicted on me as a punishment.

This jealous feeling met no encouragement from Hans. The old man had no rancour of any kind in his nature. He had no sense of discontent with his condition, nor any desire to change it. Counting staves seemed to him a very fitting way to occupy existence; and he knew of many occupations that were less pleasant and less wholesome. Rags, for instance, for the paper-mill, or hides, in both of which Herr Ignaz dealt, Hans would have seriously disliked; but staves were cleanly, and smelt fresh and sweetly of the oak-wood they came from; and there was something noble in their destiny—to form casks and hogsheads for the rich wines of France and Spain—which he was fond of recalling; and so would he say, “Without you and me, boy, or those like us, they 'd have no vats nor barrels for the red grape-juice.”

While he thus talked to me, trying to invest our humble calling with what might elevate it in my eyes, I struggled often with myself whether I should not tell him the story of my life,—in what rank I had lived, to what hopes of fortune I had been reared. Would this knowledge have raised me in the old man's esteem, or would it have estranged him from me? that was the question. How should I come through the ordeal of his judgment,—higher or lower? A mere chance decided for me what all my pondering could not resolve. Hans came home one night with a little book in his hand, a present for me. It was a French grammar, and, as he told me, the key to all knowledge.

“The French are the great people of the world,” said he, “and till you know their tongue, you can have no real insight into learning.” There was a “younker,” once under him in the yard, who, just because he could read and write French, was now a cashier, with six hundred florins' salary. “When you have worked hard for three months, we 'll look out for a master, Owen.”

“But I know it already, Hanserl,” said I, proudly. “I speak it even better than I speak German, and Italian too! Ay, stare at me, but it's true. I had masters for these, and for Greek and Latin; and I was taught to draw, and to sing, and to play the piano, and I learned how to ride and to dance.”

“Just like a born gentleman,” broke in Hans.

“I was, and I am, a born gentleman; don't shake your head, or wring your hands, Hanserl. I 'm not going mad! These are not ravings! I 'll soon convince you what I say is true.” And I hurried to my room, and, opening my trunk, took out my watch and some trinkets, some studs of value, and a costly chain my father gave me. “These are all mine! I used to wear them once, as commonly as I now wear these bone buttons. There were more servants in my father's house than there are clerks in Herr Oppovich's counting-house. Let me tell you who I was, and how I came to be what I am.”

I told him my whole story, the old man listening with an eagerness quite intense, but never more deeply interested than when I told of the splendors and magnificence of my father's house. He never wearied hearing of costly entertainments and great banqueta, where troops of servants waited, and every wish of the guests was at once ministered to.

“And all this,” cried he, at last, “all this, day after day, night after night, and not once a year only, as we see it here, on the Fraulein Sara's birthday!” And now the poor old man, as if to compensate himself for listening so long, broke out into a description of the festivities by which Herr Oppovich celebrated his daughter's birthday; an occasion on which he invited all in his employment to pass the day at his villa, on the side of the bay, and when, by Hanserl's account, a most unbounded hospitality held sway. “There are no portions, no measured quantities, but each is free to eat and drink as he likes,” cried Hans, who, with this praise, described a banquet of millennial magnificence. “But you will see for yourself,” added he; “for even the 'yard' is invited.”

I cautioned him strictly not to divulge what I had told him of myself; nor was it necessary, after all, for he well knew how Herr Ignaz resented the thought of any one in his service having other pretensions than such as grew out of his own favor towards them.

The Jews cannot abide the great folk, with their indebtedness; and to deem these inseparable is a creed.

“On the 31st of August falls the Fraulein's birthday, lad, and you shall tell me the next morning if your father gave a grander fÊte than that!”