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The Parson gave me room and board, in return for which I helped about the place, doing various chores, such as wood-splitting and clearing land for more garden, and occasionally going the nine miles to the village for the mail. My work took only a small part of my time, leaving me free to explore the near-by region, with its deep, evergreen forests, and the wild animals which lived in them.
This mixture of the coarse, but picturesque features of oriental life, with the dilapidated stateliness of palaces in the style of the full-bottom-wigged Vanbrughs of Austria, has the oddest effect imaginable. The Turks remaining in Belgrade have mostly sunk into poverty, and occupy themselves principally with water-carrying, wood-splitting, &c.
His slender store of money came to an end, and but for occasional jobs of wood-splitting as the supplies of winter fuel came in, it would have been difficult merely to live. As it was, he dragged his belt tighter about the waist of the old linen blouse and showed to the daylight a face whose whimsicality and vagueness were darkened with a touch of the saturnine.
He bethought him of his own honest James and William who often had scarcely time to discard the gardening clogs or lay down the wood-splitting axe in order to pull on their livery coats, and so began to understand that there were degrees of perfection in servitude. Certainly Patsy would learn many things here, but would she ever come back to be just his own wild, frank, helter-skelter maid?
Burrows wished them to. Supper and wood-splitting were hurried over for that evening, and Tip took his way very early to the seat under the elm-tree down by the pond. He wanted to think, to see how he should meet this new trouble; it was a real trouble to him, for he had set out to do just right, and he saw no way of getting out of this duty, and thought he saw no way of doing it.
I never had a man here who paid his bill in work as he did. It was cash down, and good money. Not a minute of wood-splitting more or less than the market-price for meals and bed. I'd like to have a tramp like that come along about twice a week. But I tell you, Phil, he ain't no tramp. Couldn't you see that? None of them loafers ever worked as he did."
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