"If it be difficult how should I know it?" answered the head servant. "Do poor folk have time to go beyond the municipal classes at school?" "Does he know?" and Aleko with a backward jerk of his thumb indicated another servant, stout and gray-haired, standing within the portal of the hotel. "He! He can scarcely read the newspaper!" "Then who knows?" "Do you not go to the Parnassos School every night?" "Of course I go." "Well, ask your schoolmaster." "Oh, he has no time; we are many boys. You see I thought as you stand here so often doing nothing, if you knew you would have time to tell me." The man scowled. "Enough words! There are your ten lepta. Go about your business and leave me to mine." Aleko slung his box over his shoulder and descended the hotel steps slowly. He was beginning to feel sore all over and his head ached. He decided that he would go home and have a sleep. Home meant the cellar which he shared with the other boy, Andoni, and with the older shoeblack, "the big one" who had brought them over from Megaloupolis, and for whom they worked, till such time as they should have earned enough to set up for themselves. Bells were ringing for noon, and after that no one would be out in the sun-blaze of the streets to want boots cleaned; there would be no work again until the sales of the evening newspapers began. He trudged rather wearily up the steep streets towards the Square of the Kolonaki, near which he lived; and as he went, he wondered once more why so many people did not know things when you asked them. There were so many things he wanted to find out. Who lived in the Academy with the two statues on the tall columns, which he passed two or three times a day, and what did people do inside it? What was in the red books which the foreigners held in their hands when they looked up at the old temples? What was that statue in the Zappion Gardens where a woman was putting a crown of leaves on a man's head? And most of all, what made automobiles go without horses when the driver turned that round wheel? The whole town was one great "Why" to him. When he reached the street behind the Kolonaki Square, and went down the steps to the cellar, he found it empty. From a shelf in one corner he took down the half of a loaf of bread, and a piece of white cheese wrapped in a sheet of paper. His mother was renowned in Megaloupolis as one of the tidiest housewives of the place, and it was from her that he had learned not to leave food about uncovered; this was also probably the reason why his face and hands were generally less grimy than those of most of the other shoeblacks.