He started to talk as if our conversation were already in full swing: “. . . not a gentleman but a ne’er-do-well, and his parents are the same way. They can’t read, or write their own names, and nor can he. No Latin to speak of! Twenty years of age and look at him! When I was his age—ah, but that was long ago. Time immemorial! I made the best of myself as a young man, but some take the blessings the Lord bestowed and squander them all. They don’t realize that greatness is within the grasp of every man, so they don’t try to achieve it.”

“Latin, eh?” was all I could manage by way of reply. Greatness? I counted myself as lucky every time I avoided a humiliating failure. There was nothing coarse about the old man’s voice, in spite of his lumpy claret-colored nose and ale-soaked beard. Undistorted by drink, his was a voice one might be pleased to listen to, I thought.

“So, have you done great things, then?” I asked him.

“I’ve tried, and I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

“Have you really?”

“Ah, but that was long ago. It doesn’t pay a man to dream, and the dreams that matter most can never come true. I didn’t know that when I was young. I’m glad I didn’t.” He sighed. “What about you, my good fellow? What will be your great achievement? Solving the murders of Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus?”

He spoke as if this were an unworthy goal.

“I never knew Negus, though I saw him once or twice,” he went on. “Shortly after I arrived in the village, he left it. One man comes, another man goes, and both for the very same reason. Both with the heaviest of hearts.”

“What reason?”

The old gnome poured an almost impossible amount of ale down his throat in one swift motion. “She never got over it!” he said.

“Who never got over what? Do you mean that Ida Gransbury never got over Richard Negus’s leaving Great Holling?”

“The loss of her husband. Or so they say. Harriet Sippel. They say it was losing him so young that made her what she was. I say that’s a poor excuse. Not much older than the kid that was sitting where you’re sitting before you were sitting there. Too young to die. There’s no end to them.”

“When you say ‘made her what she was’—I wonder what you meant by that, Mr. . . . um . . . ? Can you explain?”

“What, my good fellow? Oh, yes. It doesn’t pay a man or a woman to dream. I’m glad I was old by the time I tumbled to that.”