Not long after he has gone, the true secret of his desire to leave his employ comes out. The letter from his father, and the need of his help on the farm, are myths that his fertile imagination conjured up, and never had any existence in fact. The real truth is he had a row with the water coolie, who comes from a village in the country contiguous to his own, and who belongs to a more powerful clan than his. He dreads any further collision with this man, who might send word to his relatives there, who would speedily take measures to avenge their wrongs on their weaker neighbours, and so, to save himself and the family, he resigns. Chinese servants, taking them all in all, may be considered to be honest. It is true that from a ten commandments point of view, and the higher morality we have been accustomed to in England, they cannot in a strict sense be said to be so. Of course they have never heard of the Decalogue, and therefore they cannot be blamed for not knowing what it demands. The training they have been subjected to during the past two thousand years has taught them to look with very different eyes upon certain subjects from what ours do. Overcharges, for example, and skilful manipulations of the steelyard to make it lie, are not considered so much moral defects as tokens of an unusually active brain. A man who does not know how to do such things is not looked upon as one who has a higher standard of life, but one who is, in the expressive language of the vernacular, "idiotically honest." It is not a question of conscience with such a man, but rather a lack of brain power, which has made him less mentally fit for those keen and rapid movements of thought that are essential in the conflict of mind with mind.