ith a number
of very searching inquiries, they began to assure me that Herr Ignaz
would not put up with my incapacity for a week. "He 'll send you into
the yard," cried one; and the sentence was chorused at once. "Ja! ja!
he'll be sent into the yard." And though I was dying to know what that
might mean, my pride restrained my curiosity, and I would not condescend
to ask.

"Won't he be fine in the yard!" I heard one whisper to another, and they
both began laughing at the conceit; and I now sat down on a bench and
lost myself in thought.

"Come; we are going to dinner, Englander," said Harasch to me at last;
and I arose and followed him.

CHAPTER XVII. HANSERL OF THE YARD

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;