I gave him his cigar-case, which he had handed over to my keeping, and murmured that his kindness crushed me to the earth, and that my only consolation was in the trust that an opportunity might yet offer of my repaying the obligation in some way or other. He laughed again at this, and said I was as proud as Lucifer, but he liked me all the better for it; and as for the possibility of my repaying the obligation, as I called it, he was a man in whose life accidents and lucky hits and mishaps and chances of all kinds had played so important a part, that it would be a wonder if, among all the rest, the chance I so longed for did not turn up. So until then we would let the matter rest.
In this airy way he tried to quiet the twinges of my conscience, but he only succeeded in part; and I went to sleep, and awaked a couple of hours later, with the resolution to set decisively about the execution of another resolution, namely, in my capacity of pupil to devote myself to the neglected estate; to acquire, with the utmost possible dispatch, a complete insight into all matters of rural economy, and by the help of this knowledge and of untiring diligence, and the exertion of all my faculties, to change this ruined place in the shortest possible time--say one or two years--into a paradise, and so relieve my kind host from the necessity of winning at the card-table the resources which he could not win from his fields.
I at once devoted my attention to the forlorn-looking stables, to the cattle-sheds, only tenanted by a few wretched specimens of the bovine genus, and to a score of melancholy sheep; so that Herr von Zehren, who had an acute sense of the comic, could never get done laughing at me, until an incident occurred which gave him an opportunity of speaking a serious word with me, which to a certain extent damped the ardor of my economical studies.
That old man whom I met in the park on the first day after my arrival (whose real name was Christian Halterman, though he always went by the name of Old Christian), in his capacity of under-bailiff, and in default of a master who paid any attention to the management, and of a head-bailiff, a post that was not filled--was the wretched chief of the whole wretched establishment. Such orders as were given emanated from him; though it required no extraordinary perspicuity of vision to see that of the whole bandit-looking gang that called themselves laborers, every man did just what pleased him. When the old man, as I had once or twice seen, fell into an impotent rage, and more to relieve his wrath than in the hope of any effectual result, scolded and stormed in his singular, creaking, parrot-like voice, they laughed in his wrinkled face and kept on their own way, or sometimes even openly insulted him. Their ringleader in this insolence was a certain John Swart, commonly called "Long Jock," a great, tall, broad-shouldered fellow, with long arms like an ape's, whose physiognomy would probably have appeared to Justizrath Heckepfennig more unprepossessing even than mine, and of whose matchless strength the others told all sorts of wonderful stories.