[Footnote 8: Pottage.] These first bitter impressions never left his mind. He registered the disfavour of fortune and the fruits of his own limited capacity among the grievances of the oppressed nationality to which he belonged. Years of want, his little dilapidated dwelling--granted him in his capacity of village teacher but shoved away into an obscure corner of Hétfalu--his meagre barley-bread, his sordid frock-coat--all these things aggravated the anguish of his soul. His occasional intercourse with the lord of the manor, the arrogant and pretentious Hétfalusy, was not calculated to reconcile him with his destiny. Hétfalusy regarded as a profitless loafer every man who did not seek his bread with spade and hoe, unless, of course, he happened to be a gentleman by birth. He applied this theory to the schoolmaster race especially, whom he conceived to have been invented for the express purpose of eternally hounding on the common folks against their lawful masters, the gentry. As if the world could not go on comfortably without the peasant learning his letters! What he heard in church was quite enough for him surely! On one occasion, when mention was made in his presence of a village shepherd who had forged a bank-note, he observed that if the fellow had not learnt to write he would never have gone astray. The national school teachers, he said, were the natural attorneys of the agricultural population as against the landlords. And Hétfalusy gave practical expression to his belief whenever he had the chance. The corn he was bound to supply to the schoolmaster was always measured out to him from the bottom of the sieve; he seized the courtyard of the school for his threshers, so that during school-time not a word of the lessons could be heard for the racket; he never repaired the building set apart for the cultivation of the muses, but looked on while the schoolmaster himself patched up the holes in his wall with balls of clay borrowed from his own garden, and re-thatched the dilapidated rush-roof with his own hand. Frequently he would rate the schoolmaster in the public thoroughfare, in the presence of the gaping rustics, on the flimsiest pretext, and bully him as if he were the lowest of his menials. Thomas Bodza totted up all these outrages on the back of his map, and whenever he was immersed in that odd production, his eyes always fastened themselves on three red crosses which he had marked over the little town which indicated Hétfalu; and at all such times he would heave a deep sigh, as if he found this long waiting for the day of retribution almost too much for his patience. For that a day of retribution would arrive sooner or later was his strong belief.