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All the aristocracy of the plough were eating there at Mait' Jourdain's, the innkeeper's, a dealer in horses also and a sharp fellow who had made a great deal of money in his day. The dishes were passed round, were emptied, as were the jugs of yellow cider. Every one told of his affairs, of his purchases and his sales. They exchanged news about the crops.
He had pity on us, I suppose. . . . At the very minute when the innkeeper had taken the merchant by the beard to rip open his throat with his knife suddenly someone seemed to tap at the window from the yard! We all started, and the innkeeper's hands dropped. . . . Someone was tapping at the window and shouting: 'Pyotr Grigoritch, he shouted, 'are you here?
Hardly, however, had they swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, before they all fell down dead, for the raven had communicated to them the poison from the horse-flesh. There was no no one else left in the house but the innkeeper's daughter, who was honest, and had taken no part in their godless deeds. She opened all doors to the stranger and showed him the heaped-up treasures.
"Where our Sheriff has failed, and the stout Guy of Gisborne, and many more beside, it behoves not a mere tinker to succeed." The tinker laid a heavy hand upon the innkeeper's fat shoulder, and tried to look impressive. "There is your reckoning, host, upon the table. I must e'en go upon my way, because I have more important business than to stand here gossiping with you.
I was young in those days; I wanted to live. . . . We looked at the images and prayed, and so pitifully that it brings a tear even now. . . . And the innkeeper's wife looks at us and says: 'Good people, said she, 'don't bear a grudge against us in the other world and pray to God for our punishment, for it is want that drives us to it. We prayed and wept and prayed and wept, and God heard us.
At this threatening action the innkeeper's wife fell a-screaming, and the Jew, as in a frenzy, besought them not to tear the house down about his ears. Our hero could hardly tell what followed, only that all of a sudden there was a prodigious uproar of combat.
The picture of the innkeeper's hut, in which he had once been family-tutor, flew up irrelevantly into his mind he saw himself expounding a tattered Pentateuch to a half-naked brood behind the stove, in a smoky room full of peasants sitting on the floor guzzling whisky, or pervaded by drunken Russian soldiery hacking the bedsteads or throwing the glasses in the faces of the innkeeper and his wife.
He had not proceeded far, when he was alarmed by hearing a piteous cry of "Stop! stop!" proceeding from Blaize; and, halting, found that the porter had been so greatly terrified by the watchman's account of the frightful mortality in the poor innkeeper's family, that he had applied to his phial of plague-water, and in pulling it put had dropped his box of rufuses, and the jar of anti-pestilential confection.
Justice in Frankfort is no whit wiser nor more humane than elsewhere, albeit the city is the seat of the German Diet. It is not often that a magistrate traces back the stream of wrongdoing and misfortune to the holder of the urn from which the first beginnings trickled forth. If Brunner forgot his son, his son's friends speedily followed the old innkeeper's example.
The chaise in which they are driving has a seat with a green, fluted back, and of course the innkeeper's horse which is to take them the first six miles is a little fat sorrel. I lost my heart to her from the very first moment. There is no sense in it, for she is the most insignificant little person; but I was won by seeing all the eyes that followed her when she drove away.
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