Life in rural Wethersfield was never without amusement. For instance, I soon discovered why the horse was kept in Mrs. Dover's shed. Larrit had become engaged in a business with the printer Mr. Cloverdale who housed his presses in the lane behind the widow. Soon it was clear to everyone that Mr. Godefroy had no relationship with Mrs. Dover. But then the entire village was alarmed to learn that my servant was demanding Cloverdale order in paper of an unheard of and expensive kind. No one had seen this paper, let alone felt its weight, but its price so offended something in Cloverdale's Protestant soul that he must take his anxieties to a town meeting (of which it was judged better that I be left in ignorance). Here at the meeting house there appeared many citizens who apparently feared a counterfeit was to be committed, a type of fraud such as had become common recently.

No one came to me as they should have. As a result my servant was called before the village in the middle of the afternoon. There he was asked what he wished this expensive paper for.

He laughed at them outright, asking them what did they imagine he would do?

They did not like to say.

Thus, in the same church in which I had been so moved by the marvels of democracy, the servant publicly quizzed the printer who was soon revealed to be not very much of a printer at all, and the town was shocked to hear the questions he could not answer, and alarmed to learn these failures would have disqualified him from his trade in London or even Hartford. As for the expensive paper, the servant had already fetched it himself from Boston and used it before the printer's very nose.

He who is sometimes called the Parrot then left the meeting and returned with a colored etching of a bird he was not prepared to name, allowing only that it had been seen in the lands of Texas, and although it was commonly agreed to be very like a spoonbill parrot, its colorings were another matter, being carmine at its head and sulfur blue at its tail, and as luminous as a phoenix or some beauty in a myth. The exhibition of this etching in the meeting house produced a silence of such length and intensity that even the most prayerful would swear it had been never equaled in the long religious past. I am sorry to have missed it, this proof that God had blessed America with such a wonder. The bird itself must have seemed a miracle, a breathless holy sight, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that Wethersfield soon found itself without a printer and there was no newspaper until after Independence Day.

At this period I was engaged in writing the difficult chapters about the American judicial system, no simple matter for a French lawyer. I was daily perturbed by my servant whom I found continually staring at me, as if there were something he could tell me if he wished, but need not if he did not wish. Many is the time I found him with his lips already parted, before he seemed to change his mind.

This came to a head on an afternoon turned suddenly dark with a snowstorm, and the rest of the family out-of-doors dealing with this unexpected circumstance.

I looked up from my chores and found again that clear direct stare.

"Yes, sir," said I, and laid my notes down. I thought, I will give the chap his notice. I am sick of him.

"Sir," said he, and rose.

I thought, Good grief, the impudence.

"What is it that you wish to say? You may say it. Be done with it and go."

He hesitated.

"Continue."

"The abbe has passed away."

I slapped the rascal's face for such a filthy lie.

IN ARISTOCRATIC NATIONS, it is not unusual to find, in the service of the great lords, servants of noble and energetic character who do not feel the status they suffer, who obey their master's will with no fear of arousing his anger.

In these circumstances it would be unthinkable for the one to strike the other.

In a democracy, however, both parties know that the servant may at any moment become the master and that he has the ambition to do so; the servant is, therefore, in both parties' understandings, no different from the master. But even this unstable promise of equality will not serve as an excuse for striking Larrit as I did.

Indeed, one does not require the intelligence of Machiavelli to recognize it as unwise to invite combat with an Englishman of his type, orphaned, abandoned, therefore forced to inhabit close quarters with the most depraved type of creature, a servant through necessity although having the misfortune to imagine himself called to higher things, who must become, inevitably, a resentful character and whose body, in the singular case of the man before me, will carry the clear marks not only of the wind and sun but the barroom brawl and perhaps-unseen-the lash. Even his distinctive nose, quite handsome in its way, may not have been the one his parents gave him. In short, John Larrit was the sort of narrow-eyed and haughty character on whose account one might wisely cross the road.

I had seen his eyes blaze, most memorably aboard the Havre, where I twice had reason to fear he would kill me in my bunk, but now I observed-after a first highlight of anger-not hostility or belligerence but an awful sort of hurt. Silently, stolidly, he considered me, and I could actually see him thinking, of what, I could not say, but the thoughts themselves were as unarguable as clouds crossing a pale green sky, drifting, changing form, blocking out the sun from time to time. Before this uncanny spectacle I stood, a master, yes, but also a child, waiting to be taught the consequence of my savagery.

"You loved him then," he said at last.

"Who told you this?"

"You sir. You could not have made your point more forcefully."

So, he shamed me. I apologized to him from my heart.

"Well, sir," said he, "a man must do something when his father dies. If he does not, he will feel the pain forever."

"He was not my father."

"But there is no doubt he was worthy of the blow."

I thought, What is this to him? Was it a trick of light that his eyes appeared so moist? "Who gave you this bad news?" I demanded.

"It comes from France "-and he gave full pause before admitting that which I might not have known myself-"from your mother."

My mother, I thought. My mother. My mother who loved me so intensely, who could never hold me very long but could never let me go, my mother whom I pinched because I could not share her with the world.

I said, "Does it not seem strange that my mother should confide this awful news to you? Has she ever noticed you? Why would she not tell me?"

"In any case, her request was of a slightly different nature."

"How different? What exactly do you mean?"

But he was like a horse, shaking his head at the approach of the bridle. "To reveal that is to break a bond."

"But you and I-do we not have a bond?"

He touched his reddened cheek, waiting a discreet moment before glancing at his fingertips. "Call a spade a spade," he said. "She wants you home."

"And I should sail to France to stand by a grave? It makes no sense. My mother would never give this news as an enticement to return. If my old confessor was dying, that would be something else, but I would not cross the world to lay my hand against a stone."

"There you are then. That's it."

"What? You mean he is yet alive?"

"Your parent might have preferred I suggested that."

"Damn these riddles," I cried, but he had his sense of honor and it made him stand excessive straight. "Do you intend now to raise my confessor from the earth?"

"On my honor, he has passed away."

I thought, God save me from the scrupulousness of servants. She wants me home, of course. I thought, She would say anything that served her ends. She has heard I have been sporting. But how could she have heard?