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THE WORKERS


[Illustration: WE BREATHE THE HOT AIR, HEAVY WITH THE SMELL OF FRESH
SOIL. AND THE SWEAT DRIPS FROM OUR FACES UPON THE DAMP CLAY.]


THE WORKERS

An Experiment in Reality

by

WALTER A. WYCKOFF

Assistant Professor of Political Economy in
Princeton University

THE EAST






New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1899

Copyright, 1897, by
Charles Scribner's Sons

Trow Directory
Printing and Bookbinding Company
New York




TO

CHANNING F. MEEK, ESQ.




PREFACE


The preface to a narrative like this must itself be of the nature of a
story which will account for the expedition here described, and make
clear the point of view from which the experiment was tried.

Enough of the actual setting of the tale is implied in a passing
reference to a charming country-seat on Long Island Sound, and the
presence there of a fellow-guest, Mr. Channing F. Meek--a chance
acquaintance to me then. His wide knowledge of the West, his intimate
familiarity with practical affairs, and his catholic sympathy with
human nature, made him a man wholly new and interesting to me. And
in our talk, which drifted early into channels of social questions,
I could but feel increasingly the difference between my slender,
book-learned lore and his vital knowledge of men and the principles by
which they live and work.

One radiant Sunday morning in midsummer there came to me from his
talk so strong a suggestion of the means of acquiring the practical
knowledge that I lacked, and in a way that gave promise of an
experiment so interesting, and of such high possibility of successful
treatment, that in that hour I knew that I was pledged to its
undertaking.

No further disclosure of my _animus_ is needed than has already been
hinted at in the fact of a new, unoccupied, inviting field and the
fair prospect which its development offered to a student eager for a
place among original investigators. I cannot, however, sufficiently
acknowledge my indebtedness to the friends whose generous sympathy has
followed me throughout the enterprise--especially that friend already
mentioned. To him I owe the first idea of the plan and a large measure
of what success has attended its execution.

The narrative form into which I have cast the results of my
investigation depends for its value solely upon careful adherence to
the truth of actual experience. This account is strictly accurate even
to details; apart from confessed changes in the names of the persons
introduced, no element of fiction has intentionally been allowed to
intrude.

It only remains to say with reference to my attitude in the experiment
itself, that I entered upon it with no theories to establish and no
conscious preconceptions to maintain. As sincerely as I could, I
wished my mind to be _tabula rasa_ to new facts, and sensitive to the
impressions of actual experience.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, October 27, 1897.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I
                                     PAGE
THE ADJUSTMENT,                         1


CHAPTER II

A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT,           33


CHAPTER III

A HOTEL PORTER,                        78


CHAPTER IV

A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM,             108


CHAPTER V

A FARM HAND,                          144


CHAPTER VI

IN A LOGGING CAMP,                    179


CHAPTER VII

IN A LOGGING CAMP (_Concluded_),      225




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


WE BREATHE THE HOT AIR, HEAVY WITH THE
SMELL OF FRESH SOIL, AND THE SWEAT
DRIPS FROM OUR FACES UPON THE DAMP
CLAY,                            _Frontispiece_

                                         FACING
                                          PAGE
I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD,      24

A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A
COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR,               48

I HELD MY PEACE, AND RESPECTFULLY
TOUCHED MY CAP, INWARDLY CALLING HER
THE BEAUTY THAT SHE WAS,                     94

THE MEN WERE RISING FROM THEIR SEATS,
AND THE AIR WAS FULL OF WELCOME,            216




THE WORKERS




CHAPTER I

THE ADJUSTMENT


HIGHLAND FALLS, N. Y.,
Monday, July 27, 1891.

The boss at the work on the old Academic building in West Point gave me
a job this morning, and ordered me to come to work to-morrow at seven
o'clock. A gang of laborers is fast removing the old building, which is
to give place to a new one. From one of the workmen I learned that the
men live in Highland Falls, a mile down the river, and so I came here
in search of a boarding-house. There was some difficulty in finding
quarters, for the place is crowded with workingmen attracted here by
the new buildings at the Post and work on the railway.

Mrs. Flaherty has taken me in as a boarder. That is not her name, but
it sufficiently indicates her. She came to the door with the odor
of soap-suds and boiling cabbage strong upon her, and told me at
first that she guessed that she couldn't take me. She relented when I
explained that I had work at the Post; and, having admitted me as a
member of her household, she gave play to her natural hospitality. When
I was shown to a little carpetless room under the roof, with two double
beds in it, I spoke of needing water, and she showed me where I could
get a plentiful supply. I said that I should like to write, and she at
once invited me from the torrid heat of the attic to a place at her
dining-room table.

Here then, in the temporary security of a boarding-house, and as an
assigned member of the industrial army, I can review the first week of
enlisted service.

I am vastly ignorant of the labor problem, and am trying to learn by
experience; but I am so far familiar with Socialistic writings as to
know that, from their point of view, I have not gone from one economic
class into another. I belong to the proletariat, and from being one of
the intellectual proletarians, I am simply become a manual proletaire.
In other words, I no longer stand in the market ready to sell what
mental ability I have, I now bring to the market instead my physical
capacity for work; and I sell that at its market price. Expressed in
every-day language, the change is simply this: from earning a living as
a teacher, I have begun to earn it as an unskilled laborer.

But, nevertheless, the change has in it elements of real contrast.
One week ago I shared the frictionless life of a country-seat.
Frictionless, I mean, in the movement of an elaborate system which
ministers luxuriously to the physical needs of life. Frictionless,
perhaps, only to those to whom it ministers. Now I am out of all that,
and am sharing instead the life of the humblest form of labor upon
which that superstructure rests.

This is not a frictionless life in its adjustment to daily needs--very
much the reverse. And whatever may be its compensations, they are not
of the nature of easy physical existence.

The actual step from the one manner of life to the other was sure of
its own interest. It was painful to say good-by on the last evening,
and there was enough of uncertainty in the prospect to account for
a shrinking from the first encounter with a strange life; but there
was promise of adventure, and almost a certainty of solid gain in
experience.

At sunrise on the next morning I was ready to set out. I descended
quietly to the hall. The butler stood there, politely urging some
pretended necessity as excuse for so early an appearance, and he
invited me to breakfast.

Often had he seen me off for a day's fishing or shooting in the old
suit which I wore, but I could feel his eye fixed upon me now with
perplexed interest. He had heard my expedition discussed at the table,
and in some vague way he took in that I meant to earn my living as a
workman. With his wonted dignity, he helped me adjust my pack and strap
it; and then he stood under the _porte cochère_, and watched me hurry
across the lawn in the direction of the highway.

Two hours' walk carried me beyond the point of my acquaintance with
the country roads; but this presented no real difficulty, for I had
but to keep a steadily westward course. Other details of my expedition
were not so simple, and I began to have an uncomfortable sense of
unsuspected difficulty. I look back from the vantage-point of a
week's experience, with a feeling of amused tolerance, upon my naïve
preconceptions. It is like a retrospect of years. My notion of earning
a living by manual labor was the securing of an odd job whenever I
should need a meal or a night's lodging. Much advice had come my way
before I set out. As a means of access to people, I was told to take
with me a book or magazine, and to invite subscriptions. I adopted
this plan; and a copy of a magazine was under my arm as I walked on
through the dust and heat of the country road, wondering how long it
would take me to reach the Hudson, and how I should earn my first meal.

There was nothing at all adventurous or exciting in a dusty walk. My
pack was taking on increments of weight with each mile of the journey.
I was beginning to feel conscious of change in unexpected ways. There
was no money in my pocket, and a most subtle and unmanning insecurity
laid hold of me as a result of that. The world had curiously changed
in its attitude, or rather I saw it at a new angle, and I felt the
change most keenly in the bearing of people. My good-morning was not
infrequently met by a vacant stare, and if I stopped to ask the way,
the conviction was forced upon me that, as a pack-pedler, I was a
suspicious character, with no claim upon common consideration.

In the shade of his porch sat the keeper of a country store, at a fork
of the road. His chair was tilted against the outer wall, and his feet
rested upon the balustrade. My question as to the course of the two
roads before me was responded to by the merchant, first with a look,
and then a spurt of tobacco-juice, which stirred the dust between my
feet, and, finally, a caustic sentence to the effect that he 'did
not much know, and did not care a damn,' while his blue eyes swept
the horizon, and rested finally on the Sound, gleaming golden in the
morning sun, and the purple line of the Long Island shore.

The new-born self-consciousness which I found asserting itself was like
a wound on the hand, exposed to constant injury. I had walked several
miles before I summoned courage to speak to anyone else. Finally, very
hot and thirsty, I knocked at the door of an unpainted cottage which
stood on the road. The door opened to the touch of an old woman, who
bent toward me in the emaciated angularity of a decrepit figure which
must once have been strikingly tall and vigorous.

I asked leave to show her the magazine, and she invited me into the
cool of her home. The middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth,
on which there stood a table. A large cooking-stove occupied one side
of the room. A few wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the walls.
An old kitchen clock rested on the mantel-shelf; and on either side of
it hung a faded photograph, each in an oval wooden frame.

The old woman asked me to draw up a chair to the table, and she sat
beside me, looking with the excited interest of a child at the pictures
which I showed her, but paying little heed, I thought, to what I was
saying. Presently, without warning, she veered mentally with the
facility of childhood, and now she was looking at me intently between
the eyes, while one long skeleton hand lay on the open page before her.

"Be you a pedler?" she asked, and her eyes dilated to the measure of
the protruding sockets over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn.

"I am trying to get subscribers for this magazine," I told her.

"Was you raised in these parts?"

My negative gave her the opening for which she was unconsciously
feeling. She was born and "raised" on that spot, and had lived there
for nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me so. There was
nothing voluble in the recital of her history, only a directness and
simplicity of speech and a certain quiet reserve which rendered the
narrative absorbing to us both. Some bond of sympathy began to make
itself felt, for she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, quite
unconsciously, she wept as she told me of the death of one and another,
until not one of all her family or kindred was left to her, except her
grandson, with whom she now lived. She said no word of complaint; and,
in the presence of her human sorrows, she had no memory of poverty,
and of the bitter struggle against want which life had plainly been
for her. She was sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the table,
when she ceased speaking, and no comfort that I could offer her was
comparable to the relief that she felt in telling her story. When I
arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a comforted child.

For a stretch of several miles of country road I spurred myself to
knock at every door to which I came. My reception was curiously
uniform. I never got beyond the request for leave to show the magazine.
The reply was invariably a negative; sometimes polite, but always
emphatic. Once I did not get so far as that. A portly negress saw me
approaching her cottage from the road, and, standing strident on guard
before her door, she shouted to me across the meadow that nothing was
wanted there, and that I might save myself the walk.

It was nearing noon, and I was very hungry. The question of earning
a meal was no longer an interesting speculation, but a pressing
necessity. I turned all my attention to that. A large iron gateway
leading into a cemetery attracted me. Several ragged, tow-headed
children were playing about the lodge. One of them told me that his
father was inside, and he indicated the general direction of the
tomb-stones. I found the digger sweating freely in a half-finished
grave, and instantly offered my help as a means of earning a dinner.
The grave-digger was an Irishman. He leaned at ease upon his spade, and
soberly looked me over, and then declined my offer. He was polite, but
not at all communicative, and he met my advances with the one remark
that his "old woman" was not at home.

A little farther on, I saw three women in pursuit of a hen. I eagerly
volunteered my help, and asked for a dinner in payment. They quit the
chase, and stood confronting me with serious faces, while I eloquently
pleaded my readiness to help them. Nothing in the situation seemed to
strike them as strange or irregular, but they touched upon it with
short, grave speech, until I had the feeling of something momentous,
and I accepted their refusal with a sense of relief.

At last, in the outskirts of the village of Westport, I found a man
mowing his lawn, and he was willing to give me a dinner for completing
the work. My final success in getting an odd job was a splendid
stimulus. I urged the mower over the lawn with a vigor that surprised
me, and the dinner which I ate in the dim corner of an immaculate
kitchen was a liberal return for the labor.

All that long summer afternoon I went from house to house, asking
subscriptions for the magazine. The rack would have been easier upon
my feelings, but I was eager to discover some ready way of approaching
people. Not even the loafers at the station were in the least inclined
to share their company with me. At nightfall I earned, by sawing wood
for an hour, a supper and the right to sleep in an unused barn.

When I awoke, in the early morning, I looked with bewilderment at
the dull gray light that shone between the parted boards and through
the rifts among the shingles. I came to myself with homesickness in
full possession of me, and my back aching from the pressure of that
intolerable pack. At the pump in the barn-yard I washed myself, and
sat down to eat a slice of cold meat and some pieces of bread which I
had saved from supper. An unfriendly collie watched me, and growled
threateningly until I won him over with a share of the breakfast.

The village was muffled in a heavy, clinging fog. The buoyancy of
the previous morning was gone. It was with some difficulty that I
found the road which had been pointed out to me as the shortest cut
across country to the Hudson. I could not shake off the feeling of
homelessness and isolation; and, under its influence, the lot of the
farmers' boys, whom I met driving their carts to early market, appeared
infinitely to be desired. A life of any honest work which accounts for
one, and includes some human fellowship, and a reasonable certainty
of food and shelter, began to take on undreamed-of attractiveness, in
contrast with vagrancy. I felt outside of the true order of things,
and as having no contact with any vital current of the world. Perhaps
it was in some measure the Philistine in me asserting himself, in the
absence of his customary bath and hot coffee; for, as the fog lifted
and the sun appeared, I came upon a brook which I had only to follow a
hundred yards or more to a well-shaded pool, where the bath was soon
achieved, and I emerged feeling that a vagrant life, with some purpose
in it, was, after all, rather desirable.

The morning was only fairly begun when I reached the village of Wilton,
eight miles from Westport. Already I was tired, and certain muscles of
the shoulders and back were in violent revolt. I left my pack at the
post-office. Passing up a street, which runs at right angles to the
one by which I entered the village, I presently knocked at the last of
a row of comfortable cottages.

When the door opened I knew instinctively that the gentleman who stood
framed in it was the village pastor. I said that I was looking for
work. He asked me inside. I thought this a curious change of subject,
but willingly followed him into a dim sitting-room, fragrant of perfect
cleanliness. I explained that I was on my way to West Point in search
of work, but was without money, and so obliged to earn my living by
the way, and that I would gladly do anything that offered in payment
for bread and board. He questioned me closely, with an evident purpose
of drawing me out further, and then he abruptly offered me work on his
wood-pile, and appeared surprised at my instant agreement.

The wood was green, and the saw, with which it had first to be cut
into proper lengths, was not sharp, and it was certainly not skilfully
handled. The work was hard, but at noon there was ready for me in the
shed, a dinner of beef, and potatoes, and slices of bread, which for
lightness and color were like flakes of snow, held by a band of crisp
brown crust.

In the afternoon the minister interrupted my work with the request that
I would join him in the house, and he indicated where I could first
wash in the wood-shed. I steeled myself for a lecture on the evils of
vagrancy, with incidental references to drunkenness as its probable
cause in my case. Instead, I found the family seated for an early
"tea," and myself invited to a place at the table. I am bound to say
that I was rattled. I had expected a meal in the kitchen, and a bed in
common with the preacher's horse.

Not the least curious position in which I have so far been placed, was
that which I occupied at the minister's board. His family, I shrewdly
suspect, did not share his hospitable feelings toward me, and I could
venture a guess that it was under protest from them that I took a seat
next to the minister's daughter.

She was a pale, delicate girl, of seventeen, perhaps. Her short, brown
hair curled close to her head, and her dark eyes looked dimly at you
through huge spectacles. The light, crisp stuff in which she was
dressed seemed to create about her an atmosphere some degrees cooler
than that of the rest of the room.

By way of beginning, I offered some fatuous commonplace about the
surrounding country. Instantly I realized that I was not to venture
upon a conversation that implied terms of social equality. The child
bristled with outraged dignity, and let fall in reply a sharp
monosyllable. Further conversation with her would have been highly
diverting, but not very considerate, and so I turned to my host, who
maintained through the meal the air of one who is on the defensive, but
who is sustained by the conviction of doing his duty.

My sympathies were all with the girl. Her feeling was very natural--so
natural as to suggest the rather disturbing ideas with which Count
Tolstoi is again confronting us. It was a very practical application of
the teaching of brotherhood, that of asking a chance workman to a seat
at one's family table. But if ministering to Him is really, in part,
in such recognitions of the least of His brethren, the instinctive
shrinking of the girl brought up in a Christian home in the country was
a commentary on our drift from the simplicities of the Gospel.

In the evening I went with the minister to a prayer-meeting in
his church. A handful of people sat at solemn intervals in the
audience-room. I was plainly the only common laborer among them.
The men appeared to be comfortable farmers, and there was a village
shopkeeper or two, while the women were clearly their wives and
daughters.

In one of the agitating silences which fell upon the company after
the minister had declared the meeting open, I rose and took part; and
at the door, when the benediction had dismissed us, several of the men
spoke to me cordially. There was entire kindliness in their manner, and
they, perhaps, were not conscious of showing surprise in welcoming a
laborer to their meeting.

That night the minister insisted upon my taking a bed in his house. I
pleaded an early start. He, too, was to be up early, and in the morning
I found him in the kitchen before me. On the table were bread and milk;
and as I ate I parried the somewhat searching questions of my host.

My course from Wilton lay through Ridgefield and Salem and Golden's
Bridge, and then, crossing the line between Connecticut and New York,
it made directly for the Hudson River.

This was no great distance; but in the early stages of the march I
was much delayed by rains. Driven to shelter, I found it usually in
a barn, or a shed under which were housed the farming implements.
Here is an example: From a sudden downpour of rain I ran to an open
barn. A farmer, whom I found there unhitching his horses, eyed me
suspiciously, and gave a halting assent to my request for shelter.
He soon left me alone. I tried to read, and could not. The dull day
was deeply depressing. Like the burden of a haunting sorrow the trial
of separation weighed upon me. It was not homesickness alone, but
added to that a feeling of isolation. Poverty, I had thought, would
at once bring me into vital contact with the very poor. Instead, it
had made me an object of unfailing distrust. The very poor I found
in an occasional cottage of a farm laborer, or some grotesquely
dilapidated hovel, swarming with negro life. But they were no more
hospitable to my approach than were the well-to-do farmers, and I
met not a single vagrant like myself in the course of my walk to the
Hudson. I was lonely with the loneliness of a castaway, and I climbed
into the hay-loft and fell asleep. Here, at least, was comfort; the
deep, dreamless sleep, to which I had long been a stranger, was making
gracious advances. When I awoke, the rain was past for the time, and
I resumed my journey, with a leaden sky overhead, and soft, clinging
mud under foot; but I was strangely refreshed, and walked on quite
enheartened.

The intermittent rains interfered with my progress, and increased the
difficulty of finding chance work. Repeatedly I was offered a meal, but
denied the privilege of working for it. For twenty-four hours I went
hungry, and spent much of that time asleep in a hole which I burrowed
into a hay-stack.

But under a brightening sky on Friday, I was given some wood to chop,
and the promise of a dinner in payment.

The work was soon done, and to the dinner there was given an added
pleasure in the company of one of the two old women for whom I chopped
the wood. She sat at the table and talked to me. Perhaps she was
solicitous for her spoons. Certainly she was very entertaining. Her
dark calico dress fitted closely her thin figure; and she sat very
straight in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes
bright with gentle benignity.

In all the farming region through which I have passed on my way to the
Hudson, I have been much impressed by an unlooked-for quality in the
intelligence of the people. The books, of which I now and then caught
glimpses in their homes, were often of a surprising range. On the
sitting-room table of one farm-house I noticed a Milton, and several
volumes of Emerson, and a copy of Stevenson's Essays, besides much
current literature. Not infrequently the conversation of these people
had in it a curious suggestion of cultivation, curious only because
a dainty choice of words, and the graceful turn of a phrase were
accompanied by habitual inaccuracies of speech. They have, for example,
their own forms of the verb "to be." "I be" and "You be" are invariable
in their common usage. I wondered whether the conventional forms which
they find in their reading did not strike them as oddly foreign.

The prim little lady who sat near me through my dinner proved charming.
She showed no curiosity about my history, nor the least anxiety to
tell me hers. With an air of quiet self-possession she followed the
conversation into its natural channels, and sometimes followed it far;
for at one time she was describing for me, with admirable vividness,
the methods of irrigation in use in Colorado. But she consistently
made _done_ do duty for _did_, and she used, in some of her sentences,
negatives enough to satisfy the needs of negation in the purest of
Attic speech.

One more incident of the tramp to the Hudson: Late on Friday afternoon
I was nearing Golden's Bridge, a village on the Harlem division of the
New York Central Railroad. My road lay over the hills of a rolling
farm-region. The fields of corn were radiant with sunlight reflected
from great drops of rain which rested on the nodding blades. In the
meadows was the rich sheen of the after-growth. Golden-rod and sumach
grew thick on the roadside, and half concealed the rails of the zigzag
fences. From the forest there came a breath of fragrant coolness.

After sundown the twilight soon faded into dark. My efforts to secure
further work had been unsuccessful. Once I was nearing the ruin of a
little wooden cottage, on the porch of which sat a woman enjoying the
cool of the evening. Upon seeing me enter the gate she fled within, and
slammed the door; and I heard the key turn in the lock. I was growing
tired. The actual journey had not carried me far, but the long fast of
the previous day and the toilsome walking over soft roads had resulted
in exhaustion. Scarcely physical strength remained with which to move
farther, and I was ready to throw myself down, with infinite relief,
under any chance shelter, when I caught sight of the village lights not
a quarter of a mile beyond.

I knocked at the first door on the street. A farmer's wife appeared,
and kindly offered to consult her husband on the subject of work. She
soon returned with a favorable reply, and invited me to follow her into
the kitchen. Carpetless as it was, and stained as to walls and ceiling,
and low, and dimly lighted, the shelter of that room was like softest
luxury. A pitcher of milk and some slices of bread were placed on the
table, and I ate ravenously.

At one end of the table sat the farmer in his shirt-sleeves, with a
newspaper spread before him. He was in the midst of his haying, he
said, and had plenty of work, and was willing enough that I should join
the other men in the hay-field. The shed for the hands was full, so I
offered to go to the barn, and was soon fast asleep on the loose hay in
a stall.

As the farmer and I walked to the barn, I had taken occasion to fortify
myself in the agreement regarding work. He was an old man, very hale
and hearty and genial, and he walked with a curiously stiff movement
of the legs, and with his feet nearly at right angles to the line of
progress. He set my mind at rest with the assurance that there would be
plenty of work for me, if the morning proved good.

The morning was all that could be desired. I got up early, and went
to the kitchen, where an Irish maid-of-all-work gave me a bit of soap
and some water in a tin basin, with which to finish my preparation for
breakfast. She was a beautiful girl, large and awkward and ill-groomed;
but her features were strikingly handsome, and her clear, rich
complexion would of itself have constituted a claim to beauty, while
sprays of golden hair fell in effective curls about her forehead, and
heightened the charm of her deep-set Celtic blue eyes. I was drying
my face and hands on a coarse towel which hung on a roller near the
kitchen-door, and which was used in common by all of the hired men.
She watched me curiously. Presently she ventured an inquiry as to
whether "the boss" had given me "a job." I said that he had. "Her eyes
were homes" of deep concern, and in her voice was that note of pity so
effective in the Celtic accent. She was saying that my hands did not
look as though I was used to work. I was blushingly conscious that my
hands were against me, but she tactfully tried to relieve the situation
by supposing that I was a "tradesman." Then had to come the damaging
confession that I was not. But the other hired men now began to enter,
and we sat down to breakfast.

A breakfast on a farm is not always the appetizing reality that the
inexperienced imagination paints. The cloth, in this case, was ragged,
and showed signs of long use since its last washing, and there were
no napkins. The service was repulsive in its hideous tastelessness.
Flies swarmed in the room, and crowded one another into our food. The
men were in their working clothes, coatless, sleeves rolled up, and
their begrimed shirts open at the neck. When our coffee was poured
out and handed to us, each used his own spoon in dipping sugar from a
bowl which was passed from hand to hand. The butter, in a half-melting
condition, and dark with imprisoned flies, was within reach of us all,
and each helped himself with his knife, and then used it in conveying
food to his mouth. This last feat I did not try. There was in it a
suggestion of necromancy, and I had doubts of my success. We ate in
silence, as though the gravity of the occasion was beyond speech. The
farmer did not appear until we had finished breakfast, and I waited at
the kitchen-door for orders from him.

He came at last, kind and cordial as ever, but quite changed in purpose
regarding my going to work. He urged my confessed inexperience, and the
danger of exposure to the sun. I protested my willingness to assume
the risks, and begged to be allowed at least to work for what had been
given me. But he would not listen, and appeared to think that he set
matters right by assuring me repeatedly that to what I had received I
was "perfectly welcome." His wife gave me, at parting, some tracts, and
a religious newspaper, and in these I found presented, in somewhat
lurid light, the evil consequences of insobriety.

Knowing that I was within walking distance of Garrisons-on-Hudson,
I resolved to reach that point before night. My letters had been
forwarded there, and my eagerness to get them was of a kind
unexperienced before. It was Saturday, and, late in the afternoon, I
reached Garrisons after a hard day's march. The heat was intense, and
although I walked but a little more than twenty miles, the effort of
carrying my pack was thoroughly exhausting. The woman in charge at the
post-office was in evident doubt about the safety of giving me so large
a packet of letters, but yielded at sight of others which I showed her,
and readily agreed to look after my pack until I should call for it.

Between the station and the river was a tavern, and there I meant to
apply for work. As I neared the station platform, a train from New
York drew in. Something familiar in one of the passengers who alighted
put me on my guard. In a moment I recognized a fellow-guest at a
dinner-party of a few evenings before, and I remembered, with an odd
sense of another existence, that, over our coffee, on a broad veranda,
overlooking a harbor, bright with the night-lights of a squadron of
yachts, he had given me the benefit of an amazing familiarity with the
details of the recent baccarat scandal. My anxiety was needless, for I
easily passed unnoticed in the crowd.

[Illustration: I EASILY PASSED UNNOTICED IN THE CROWD.]

I walked on to the tavern. Its keeper was busy behind the bar when I
asked him for a job. He surprised me immensely with a ready promise of
work, and he asked me to wait until he could arrange matters. I went
into an adjoining room, and took out my letters.

It was the pool-room, and the walls were hung with colored prints of
prize-fighters, with arms folded on their bare chests in a way that put
their biceps much in evidence. And there were pictures of race-horses
which had won distinction. An old, much-battered pool-table occupied
the middle of the room. Around the walls ran a rough wooden bench.
Dirt was everywhere conspicuous. The ceiling and walls were filthy.
The floor was bare and unswept, and there were accumulations of dust
about the table-legs and in the corners under the benches, which could
be accounted for only by a liberal allowance of time. The two small
windows, through which one could see the dismal tavern yard, apparently
had never been washed.

I sat on a bench, and opened the letters. The dim past of my
"respectable" life began to brighten with increasing vividness. Quite
lost to present surroundings, I was suddenly recalled to them by the
appearance of the boss, who came with a cloth in hand, with which he
aimlessly dusted the table while he questioned me. I was so absorbed
in letters that, for a moment, I could not place myself, nor in the
least account for the situation. The keeper was asking me what I could
do. This was a natural question under the circumstances; but it took
me by surprise, and it staggered me. I covered my confusion with a
profession of willingness to be useful, and of a desire to work. The
boss, a coarse, blear-eyed, sensuous-looking man, eyed me doubtfully,
and suddenly concluded that he had no work for me.

But I was wide awake now. I knew that the nearest farms were some miles
back in the country, and that, except at the tavern, I had slender
chance of food or shelter. I said that if there was work to be done, I
was eager to do it, and that if, after a trial, he found me incapable,
he could dismiss me at any moment.

I fancied that I had gained my point, for he told me to follow him, as
he led the way into the kitchen. There we found the cook bending over a
range, in which the fire refused to burn.

"Mrs. Murphy," said the boss, "here's a man I've hired to help Sam,"
and then he turned sharply upon me with a "Damn you now, work! if you
know how to work!"

My opportunity lay in the smouldering fire, so I hastened to the
wood-pile, and presently returned with an armful of fine wood which
insured a fire for dinner.

Mrs. Murphy was a little, old, emaciated Irish woman, with her
thin white hair parted in the middle, smoothed back, and twisted
into a careless knot on her crown. Her face was wrinkled almost to
grotesqueness, and she had the passive air of one to whom can come no
surprises of joy or sorrow, as though the capacity for sensation were
gone, and life had reduced itself to mere existence. I watched for
opportunities of helping her, and she accepted the services as though
she had been accustomed to them always.

She began to interest me deeply. I learned from her that Sam, whom I
was hired to help, was a scullion and stable boy. When she had nothing
further for me to do in the kitchen, I returned to the wood-pile,
and chopped industriously, hoping to give evidence of my fitness for
the place. In an hour or more the proprietor called me, intending, I
supposed, to give me a change of work; but, instead, he gave me a
quarter, and told me, not unkindly, but firmly, that he did not want me.

The situation was discouraging. I had tramped some twenty miles through
dust and heat over a hilly country, and since the early morning I had
had nothing but a few apples to eat. Besides, it was fast growing dark,
and so too late to look for work on the farms back in the country.

The immediate neighborhood is largely taken up with country-seats,
and I made repeated efforts to get work at the hands of a gardener. I
soon discovered that I was in a community where special provision is
made against my class. At the carriage gates I not infrequently found
a notice which warned me of the presence of dogs, and although the
dogs gave me no trouble, a lodge-keeper, or footman, or gardener, upon
learning my errand, was invariably seized with fervent anxiety for
getting me unnoticed out of the grounds.

At nightfall I walked back to the tavern, and asked the proprietor
if I might sleep in his stables. To my surprise, he was exceedingly
friendly. He readily agreed to that, and, of his own accord, he invited
me to remain at the tavern over Sunday, and to take my meals in the
kitchen; and he added that, on Monday morning, he would give me some
work to do as compensation.

Already I had made a friend of the cook, and she now received me
warmly. Perhaps it was her habitual good-nature, for she had the same
kindly manner toward the other men, Sam and the three Irish section
hands from the railway, who took their meals with her. More than ever I
was attracted to her. She cordially greeted the workmen as they entered
her hot, reeking, ill-lit kitchen, addressing them by affectionate
diminutives of their first names, as Johnnie and Jimmie and the like.
They clearly had a warm regard for her, and they respectfully lowered
their voices and said "ma'am" in addressing her. To be sure they swore
viciously in her presence; but then she swore, too, not ill-naturedly,
but simply as an habitual means of emphasizing her usual language.

I watched her for some sign of ill-temper. In stifling quarters and
under exasperating inconveniences she toiled on at work far beyond her
strength, not patiently merely, but with the cheerfulness which is
always thoughtful of the comfort of others.

In spite of fatigue, that night in the stable was not a restful one.
The air lay heavy and hot in the unventilated loft, and through the
night the horses, tortured by flies, stamped ceaselessly in their
stalls. About midnight two men came into the barn. I soon knew them
for bedless wanderers like myself, and I awaited them in the hay with
an interest that was lively. They did not climb to the loft, but lay
down in a wagon; and for an hour or more I heard their gruff voices in
antiphonal sentences replete with strange oaths. They were speaking in
low tones and not excitedly, but their speech seemed little else than
profanity.

The heat and darkness intensified the quiet of the night. The
breathless stillness was broken only by the hoarse blasphemies below,
and the nervous stamping of the pestered brutes. I tried to shut out
the sounds, and at last fell asleep.

In the early morning I awoke to a beautiful mid-summer Sunday, the
first of my vagrant life. Sam was whistling at his work in the stables
and the tramps were gone. I found a path behind the barn leading to a
point on the river-bank where I could bathe.

The military cadets were out on Sunday parade, and the music of their
band was the summer morning itself, vocal in notes other than the songs
of birds, and the soft murmur of the river. The tents of the camp shone
spotlessly white on the bluffs above the water. Some of the buildings
were visible among the trees. The sheer approach to the Post and its
dark background of well-wooded highlands threw into strong relief its
commanding position. Among the hills to the north the river appears.
The immediate section of it might be a lake, girt with steep hills,
that are dense with infinite shades of green. About the Post the river
sweeps in a magnificent curve, and disappears among the hills to the
south.

The few books that my pack contained made generous amends, on this
day of rest, for the weight which they had added to my load. After
breakfast I took one of them to a shaded corner of the church-yard, and
read there until the service hour, and then I slipped into a seat half
hidden by the baptismal font.

In his sermon the rector contrasted the emasculated ideas of the
present with reference to God's judgment of sin, with the virile
thinking of the Middle Ages, expressed in such works of art as Dante's
Inferno, and Angelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Earnestly
and eloquently he pleaded the reality of spiritual things to the minds
of men in those ages of belief, and then he solemnly urged a return to
the plain truths of inspiration, and to the teaching of the Church,
that "God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance," and
that the punishment of unrepented evil is "eternal death."

The church was well filled, and I looked it over with a quickened
interest. The sexton and I, so far as I could see, were the only
representatives of the poor. Outside were a number of coachmen and
grooms and nurse-maids; but these, it is likely, were of another
persuasion. Certainly they would have looked curiously out of place
to our Protestant eyes among that well-dressed, prosperous company.
I knew this body of worshippers at a glance; some of them I knew
personally. It was easy to follow them all in imagination to country
houses where the afternoon would be spent in what escape there offered
from the heat. On the next day would be begun again the round of
wholesome recreation and of social intercourse, relieved from the
formality of town life, which makes up the summer rest, and which
implies the leisure which is rendered possible only by the continuous
work of a multitude of the poor, who constitute the parts of intricate
social and domestic machinery. I seem to be dwelling upon a costly
immunity from physical labor. It was not this that appealed to me.
These worshippers had leisure, but they were far from being idle. My
personal acquaintance went far enough to recognize among them persons
whose lives are full of strenuous activity in channels of splendid
usefulness. It was the social cleavage which yawned to my vision from
the new point of view. The rich were there in the house of God, but not
the poor; and the very atmosphere of the place seemed to preclude the
presence of the poor.

I had asked Sam to go to church with me. Sam had been watering the
horses, and now had an empty bucket in each hand and some tobacco in
his mouth. He stood still for a moment, regarding me intently, and
shifting the tobacco from one cheek to the other. Then he asked me with
much directness if I took him for a "dude." I said that I should then
go alone. "That way?" asked Sam, with an eye to my gear. "It is the
best that I can do," I explained. "Then go, and be fired for a bum," he
replied, as he moved on toward the pump.




CHAPTER II

A DAY-LABORER AT WEST POINT


HIGHLAND FALLS, N. Y.,
Monday, August 3, 1891.

At three o'clock on Saturday afternoon I decided to quit work on
the old Academic building. I went up to the boss and told him of my
intention, as I had seen other men do, and was ordered into the office;
there, without a moment's delay, the timekeeper's books were consulted,
and No. 6 was paid the five dollars and eighty-five cents which were
due him. Five dollars are gone to Mrs. Flaherty for board; seventy-five
cents more will be owing to her to-morrow morning for another day, and
then I shall set out on the road with ten cents in my pocket.

I had calculated upon a balance far in excess of that; for when I went
to work on Tuesday, five full working-days were before me, and, at a
wage of one dollar and sixty cents, they were to yield an income of
eight dollars. My reckoning left out the chance of rain. For three
days passing showers drove us to cover, and the "called time" was as
closely noted by the boss as it is by the referee in a foot-ball game;
only we were given no chance to make it up.

Mrs. Flaherty's home has a real hold upon my affections. It is one
in my mind with the blessed interludes of rest which were brief
transitions from one æon of work to another. My acquaintance with the
household covers a period of incalculable time. Mrs. Flaherty wears
toward me now a motherly air of possession; and she wrinkles her brows
in perplexed protest when I tell her that I am going away in the
morning, with no knowledge of where I shall find another place; and
she wipes her mouth with the corner of her apron, and tells me, with
increasing emphasis, that I'd better stay by my job, and let her care
for me decently, and not go wandering about the country, and, as likely
as not, come to harm.

Her husband is a painter, a little round man with red hair and high
spirits, who is a well-preserved veteran of the Civil War, and very
fond of telling you of his life as a "recruitie."

Minnie is their daughter. She inherits her father's hair, and gives
promise of his rotundity. But just now Minnie is fifteen, and the world
is a very interesting and exciting place. She took her first communion
last Easter, and still wears her confirmation dress on Sundays, and
is really pretty in a blushing effort to look unconscious when Charlie
McCarthy calls.

Charles appears regularly on Sunday afternoons, I gather. He is a
driver for an ice-dealer, is not much older than Minnie, and is very
proud of a light-gray suit and a pair of highly polished brown boots.

Tom is Minnie's only brother. He is a stoker on a river-boat, and can
spend only his Sundays at home. Tom is a little past his majority, and
takes himself very seriously as a man. He tells you frankly that he
is earning "big money," and is anxious that you shall not escape the
knowledge that he is a libertine.

The child that he is came comically to the surface last night, with no
least regard for the newly found dignity of manhood. Tom shares one of
the beds in my room, and in the middle of the night he came bounding
to the floor in a nightmare, and running to the door began pounding
it with both hands, and screaming, "Papa! Papa!" like a child in a
paroxysm of fear. He soon woke himself, and then he slunk into bed and
was surly with us as we crowded about him, eager to know the cause of
this violent awaking.

Jerry and Pete and Jim and Tom Wilson and I are the boarders. Wilson's
is the only surname that I know. Surnames are little in use on this
level of society; they smack of a certain formality like that which
attaches to Sunday clothes. We were all sitting on the porch after
supper on my first evening, and I knew that the men were taking my
measure. Jerry broke the silence with an abrupt inquiry after my name.
I responded with my surname. Jerry took his pipe from his mouth, and
turned to me with some warmth: "That's not what I want to know. What's
your first name? What's a man to call you?" "Oh, call me John," I said,
with sudden inspiration, and I have passed as "John" accordingly.

Wilson and I worked together at unskilled labor, and we have a bed in
common; and it was during a night of fearful heat, when neither of us
could sleep, that Wilson, in a burst of confidence, told me his full
name.

I had noticed him as a new-comer on the works on Wednesday morning.
He accepted the job with alacrity, and, in spite of evident physical
weakness, he went to work with feverish energy. At noon hour we shared
a dinner, and he told me that he had slept in the open for three nights
running, and had had nothing to eat since the previous noon. I referred
him to Mrs. Flaherty, and at supper I found him at a place at her
table.

It was that night that he gave me his confidence. Two years ago he
came to America from the north of Ireland. From the first he had
found it hard to get work, and he had never kept a job long. This was
chiefly due, he said, to his having been brought up to the work in the
linen-mills, and to the difficulty that he found in adapting himself to
any other. And now his narrative suddenly glowed with active personal
interest, for, with each succeeding sentence about his apprenticeship
in Lurgan, there rose into clearer memory visions of a charming
fortnight once spent at the home of the owners of the mill.

I have set for myself to-day the task of describing the past week of
actual service in the ranks of the industrial army. My pen runs wide
of the subject, and I have to force it to the retrospect. There were
five working-days of nine hours and a quarter each, less the "called
time" eaten out by the rain. Never was there clearer proof of the
pure relativity of time measured by an artificial standard. Hours had
no meaning; there were simply ages of physical torture, and short
intervals when the physical reaction was an ecstasy.

We were called at six on Tuesday morning; and at twenty minutes to
seven we had breakfasted, and were ready to start for the works, each
with his dinner folded in a piece of newspaper. Passing from our side
street to the road which leads to the Post, we were at once merged in a
throng of workingmen moving in our direction.

I was suddenly aware of a novel impression of individuality. Gangs of
workingmen, as I recalled them, were uniform effects in earth-stained
jeans and rugged countenances, rough with a varying growth of stubborn
beard. To have distinguished among them would have seemed like
distinguishing among a crowd of Chinese. Now individuality began to
appear in its vital separateness, and to awaken the sense of infinite
individual sensation, from which we instinctively shrink as we do from
the thought of unbroken continuity of consciousness.

But my eyes were growing sensitive to other differences, certainly
to the broad distinction between skilled and unskilled workmen. Many
orders of labor were represented--masons and carpenters and bricklayers
and plasterers, besides unskilled laborers. An evident superiority
in intelligence, accompanied by a certain indefinable superiority in
dress, was the general mark of skilled labor. And then the class of
unskilled workers was noticeably heterogeneous in composition, while
many of the other class were plainly of American birth.

It is a mile from Highland Falls to West Point, and we moved briskly.
There was little conversation among the men. Most of them had taken off
their coats, and with these over their arms and their dinner-pails in
hand, they walked in silence, with their eyes on the road. The morning
was sultry and overhung with heavy clouds, full of the promise of rain.
A forest lines much of the road, and from the overhanging boughs fell
great drops of dew, dotting the surface of soft dust. The wayside weeds
and bushes were gray with a coating of dust, and seemed to cry out in
the still, hot air for the suspended rain.

The old Academic building stood near to the Mess Hall at the southern
end of the Post. In process of removal one wing had been blown up by
dynamite, I was told, and now its site lay deep in heaps of débris. It
was here that one gang of laborers was employed, and it was with them
that the boss had instantly given me a job upon my application on the
previous morning.

There were about sixty men in the company. Most of them stood grouped
among the ruins, ready to begin work on the hour. I had but to
follow their example. I hung my coat, with my dinner in one pocket,
on a neighboring fence, and brought a shovel from the tool-house, and
joined the other men. We stood silent, like a company at attention.
The teamsters drove up with their carts, and the bosses counted them.
In another moment the head boss, who had been keeping his eye on his
watch, shut the case with a sharp metallic click, and shouted "Turn
out!" in stentorian tones.

The effect was magical. The scene changed on the instant from one of
quiet to one of noisy activity. Men were loosening the ruined mass with
their picks, and urging their crow-bars between the blocks of stone,
and shovelling the finer refuse into the carts, and loading the coarser
fragments with their hands. The gang-boss, mounted upon a section of
wall, began to direct the work before him. A cart had been driven
among the ruins, and he called three of us to load it with the jagged
masonry that lay heaped about it. It was too coarse to be handled with
shovels, and we went at it with our hands. They were soon bleeding from
contact with the sharp edges of rock; but the dust acted as a styptic
and helped vastly in the hardening process. When the cart was loaded,
another took its place, and then a third and a fourth.

In a harsh, resonant voice the boss was shouting his orders over our
heads, to the farthermost portion of the works. His short, thickset,
muscular figure seemed rooted to the masonry on which he stood. The
mingled shrewdness and brute strength of his hard face marked him as a
product of natural selection for the place that he filled. His restless
gray eyes were everywhere at once, and his whole personality was tense
with a compelling physical energy. If the work slackened in any portion
of the ruins, his voice took on a vibrant quality as he raised it to
the shout of "Now, boys, at it there!" and then a lash of stinging
oaths. You could feel a quickening of muscular force among the men,
like the show of eager industry in a section of a school-room that has
fallen suddenly under the master's questioning eye.

In the dust which rose from the débris I picked up a mass of heavy
plaster, and, before detecting my mistake, I tossed it into the cart.
But the boss had seen the action, and instantly noticed the error,
and now all his attention was directed upon me. In short, incisive
sentences, ringing with malediction, he cursed me for an ignoramus and
threatened me with discharge. I could feel the amused side-glances of
the men, and could hear their muffled laughter.

At last all the carts were loaded and driven away, and until their
return, some of us were set at assorting the débris--throwing the
splintered laths and bricks and fragments of stone and plaster into
separate heaps. The work compelled a stooping posture, and the pain of
lacerated fingers was as nothing compared with the agony of muscles
cramped and forced to unaccustomed use.

A business-like young fellow, with the air of a clerk, now began
to move among the men, and they showed the keenest interest in his
approach. I heard them speak of him as the "timekeeper," but I had no
knowledge of such a functionary, and I wondered whether he had any
business with me. He hailed me with a brisk "What is your number?" I
looked at him in surprise. "He's a new hand," shouted the boss from his
elevation. "What's your name?" asked the timekeeper, as he turned a
page in his book. I told him, and when he had written it he drew from
his pocket a brass disk, upon which was stamped the number six, and
this he told me to wear, suspended by its string, and to show it to him
as often as he made his rounds.

The cartmen had reappeared and received their loads, and had again
driven off, in long procession, in the direction of Highland Falls.
We went back to the varied torture of assorting. But the pain was
not purely physical. The work was too mechanical to require close
attention, and yet too exhausting to admit of mental effort. I did not
know how to prevent my mind from preying upon itself.

At last I hit upon a plan which appealed to me. I simply went back in
imagination to the familiar country-seat, and followed the morning
through a likely course. We met at breakfast, and complained of the
discomfort of the sultry day as we discussed our plans, and then we
walked over the lawn to the pier. Two cruising sloops, that had waited
in the hope of a freshening breeze, now weighed anchor, and under
main-sail and top-sail and jib drifted slowly out of the harbor. We
watched them in idle curiosity, wondering at the distinctness with
which the conversation of the yachtsmen came back to us across the oily
placidity of still water, until they seemed almost half way to the
spindle, and then we agreed upon a morning ride. We telephoned to the
stables, and before we were ready the horses stood restless under the
_porte-cochère_. Step by step I followed our progress along the road
that skirts the inlet, and across the crumbling bridge on the turnpike,
and under the great, drooping elms which line the village-street in
Fairfield, and up the long ascent of the Greenfield Hill to the old
church, and then home by the "back road." The dogs came running at us
from the stables with short, sharp barks of welcome as we cantered
past, and we called to them by name. As we turned by the reservoir, we
could see a groom running down the path in order to reach the house
before us. Hot from the ride, we passed through the dim mystery of
the hall and billiard-room and den, and out upon the veranda, where
a breath of air was stirring, and the fountain played softly in its
bed of vines and flowers. Louis had returned from market. Our letters
lay in order on the settle, and near them, neatly folded, were the
morning papers. And now Louis's approach was heralded by the tinkling
of ice against the glass of bumpers of cooling drinks, and his bow was
accompanied with a polite reminder that luncheon would be served in
half an hour.

I had been working with all my strength. Now I looked up at the boss
in some hope of a sign of the noon hour. There was none. Painfully I
went back to the work. Again I tried to find diversion in this new
device. Slowly, with double the needed time for each event, I followed
the morning through another imaginary series. Now I was sure that the
boss had made a mistake and had lost track of the time, and was working
us far into the afternoon. The clouds had thickened, and the growing
darkness I was certain was the coming night. Great drops of rain began
to fall, but the men paid them no heed. Soon the drops quickened to
a shower, and still the men worked on. The moisture from within and
without had made us wringing wet when the boss ordered us to quit. We
bolted for our coats and dinner-pails, and then huddled in the shelter
of the still-standing walls of the ruin. Through one of the great
doorways I caught sight of the tower of a neighboring building with a
clock in it. It was twenty minutes to nine! In all that eternity since
we began to load the first cart, we had been working one hour and forty
minutes, and had each earned about twenty-nine cents.

The rain cost us an hour of working-time, and then we went back, and
found some relief from the earlier discomfort in the saturation which
had thoroughly settled the dust.

In another hour, with no freshening of the air, the clouds faded out of
the sky. The sun shone full upon us, and there arose from the heaps of
ruin a mist heavy with the smell of damp plaster. But I had my "second
wind" at last, and I worked now with the feeling of some reserve of
physical strength. It was with surprise that I heard the loud voice of
the head boss in a shout of "Time's up!" and almost before I knew what
had happened the men were seated on the ground, in the shadows of the
walls, eating their dinners.

I opened mine with much curiosity. There were two huge sandwiches,
with slices of corned beef between the bread, and a bit of cheese and
a piece of apple-pie, very damp and oozing. Among the other men, with
my aching back pressed against the wall, I sat and ate my dinner,
lingering over the last crumbs like a child with some rare dainty.

At the end of the forty-five minutes allowed to us at noon, there
came again, from the head boss, the order to "Turn out." In a moment
the scene of the morning was renewed. There was the same alternation
between loading the carts and assorting the débris.

We had been but a few minutes at work when the cadets went marching
past, on their way to mess. Familiar as most of the men were with
the sight, they seized eagerly upon the diversion that it offered.
The boss relaxed his vigilance. The work visibly slackened, as we
lent ourselves to the fascination of individual motion merged into
perfect harmony of collective movement. Conspicuous in the rear was
the awkward squad, very hot in its effort to walk erect, and keep its
shoulders back and its little fingers on the seams of its trousers. The
men laughed merrily at the comical contrast between such grotesquely
strenuous efforts at conformity and the ease and strength and grace of
the unison which preceded it.

No rain came to give us breathing-space in the afternoon. Hour by hour
the relentless work went on. The sun had soon absorbed the last drop
of the morning rain, and now the ruins lay burning hot under our feet.
The air quivered in the heat reflected from the stone and plaster about
us; the fine lime-dust choked our breathing as we shovelled the refuse
into the carts. You could hear the muttered oaths of the men, as they
swore softly in many tongues at the boss, and cursed him for a brute.
But ceaselessly the work went on. We worked as though possessed by a
curious numbness that kept us half-unconscious of the straining effort,
which had become mechanical, until we were brought to by some spasm of
strained muscles.

But five o'clock came at last, and with it, on the second, the loud
"Time's up!" of the head boss. You could see men fairly check a tool
in its downward stroke, in their eagerness not to exceed the time
by an instant. In two minutes the tools were housed and the works
deserted, and the men were running like school-boys, with a clatter of
dinner-pails, in a competitive scramble for seats in the dump-carts,
which were moving toward Highland Falls.

The hindmost were left to walk the mile to their lodgings. I fell in
with two old Irishmen, who noticed me with a friendly look, and then
went on with their conversation, paying me no further heed. But I felt
strangely at home with these old men. Their short, faltering steps
exactly suited my own, and I comfortably bent my back to the angle of
their stoop, not in an effort to simulate their figures, but because to
stand erect cost me exquisite agony.

The men in the carts were soon out of our sight, but the remnant was
large and was thoroughly representative. We formed a weird procession,
this fragment of a company in the ranks of labor. There were few
native-born Americans, one or two perhaps, besides myself; but there
were Irish and Scandinavians and Hungarians and Italians and negroes.

[Illustration: A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A COMPANY IN THE
RANKS OF LABOR]

As a physical exertion, walking was not hard after our day's labor.
It was a change and a rest, and we must all have felt the soothing
refreshment in the breath of cool air which was moving down the river,
and in the soft light of the early evening, which brought out in new
loveliness the curves of the opposite hills and deepened the shades of
blue and green. My own appreciation of all this and more would have
been livelier but for two overpowering appetites, which were asserting
themselves with unsuspected strength. I was hungry, not with the hunger
which comes from a day's shooting, and which whets your appetite to
the point of nice discriminations in an epicure's dinner, but with a
ravenous hunger which fits you to fight like a beast for your food, and
to eat it raw in brutal haste for gratification. But more than hungry,
I was thirsty. Cold water had been in abundant supply at the works, and
we drank as often and as freely as we chose. But water had long since
ceased to satisfy. My mouth and throat were burning with the action of
the lime-dust, and the physical craving for something to quench that
strange thirst was an almost overmastering passion. I knew of no drink
quite strong enough. I have never tasted gin, but I remembered in one
of Froude's essays a reference to it as much in use among working-men,
and as being seasoned to their taste by a dash of vitriol, and eagerly
I longed for that.

Half-way down the road we met some young women in smart dog-carts
driving to the sunset parade at the post. In the delicate fabric and
color of summer dress they seemed to us the embodiment of the cool of
the evening. Suddenly I looked with a keener interest. With her fingers
outstretched she was shading her eyes from the horizontal rays of the
setting sun, and she did not see us, rather saw through us, as through
something transparent, the familiar objects on the roadside. I had
seen her last in town at a wedding at St. Thomas's, and fate unkindly
sent her up the aisle on the arm of another usher. I laughed aloud,
a short, harsh laugh, that escaped me before I was aware, and that
had in it so odd a quality that it gave me an uncomfortable feeling
of unacquaintance with myself. The two old Irishmen turned inquiring
glances at me, and appeared disturbed at my serious look.

My room, when I reached it, was, in spite of wide-opened windows, like
Nero's bath at Baiæ. The ceiling and walls glowed with stored-up heat.
Jim was there making ready for supper, and I could hear Jerry and Pete
in their room in similar preparation.

When I put my hands into the cold water, I could scarcely feel them;
but the pain of cleansing grew sharp, and yet, when I had thoroughly
washed them, although the fingers felt double their normal size, they
were really less swollen, and were far on the way to comfort.

The reaction had set in now, and I could feel it in great, cooling
waves of physical well-being. The table was heaped with supper, huge
slices of juicy sirloin, and dishes of boiled potatoes and cabbage and
beans, from which the steam rose in fragrant clouds. By each plate was
a large cup of tea, so strong and hot that it bit like lye, and it soon
washed away the burning lime-dust.

We sat down with our coats and waistcoats off. The men were in the best
of good-humor, and the conversation ran into friendly talk. They asked
me how I liked my job. I thought much better of it by this time, and I
tried to wear the air of critical content. They may have had their own
notions about my previous experience of manual labor, but certainly
they did not obtrude these with any show of suspicion. They accepted me
as a working-man on perfectly natural terms. Until Wilson came I was
the only unskilled laborer among them, but my different grade was no
barrier to our intercourse, and we met and talked with the freedom of
men whose experience is innocent of conventional restraints.

Long after supper we sat on the porch, smoking in the twilight. A deep
physical comfortableness possessed us. Each mouthful of meat and drink
had wrought miraculous healing, and had restored wasted energy in
measures that could be felt. My muscles were sore, but the very pain
turned to pleasure in the ease of relaxation.

The men were town artisans, skilled laborers, attracted here by the
abundance of work. Jerry was a plasterer, and Pete a bricklayer, and
Jim a stone-mason. A short, slender figure, a smooth-shaven face
with small, sharp, regular features, black hair, and gray eyes, is a
sufficient outline of Jerry's personality. His air was that of a cynic,
and there was a cynical flavor in his speech, but the sting of it was
gone at the sight of his soft gray eyes, full of generous reserve of
human kindness.

Pete was a well-set-up young fellow, of twenty-five, perhaps, plainly
of German parentage. Like Jerry, he was smooth-shaven, and there was a
striking contrast between his dark hair and his singularly fair skin
and blue eyes. He was a bricklayer, and ambitious of promotion. He
spoke hopefully of an appointment in the Navy Yard as a result of a
recent examination.

Jim was the only married man among us. His wife and three children
were in Brooklyn, and Jim went home every Saturday night, and spent
Sunday with them. He was a handsome young Scotsman, with curling brown
hair, and brown eyes, and a well-formed mustache, and a round face with
full features. In the casual flow of our talk, Jim spoke of Burns, and
quoted him with a ready familiarity. It was easy to catch the drift of
his liking. Its set was steadily toward passages which sing the wrongs
and oppression of the poor. Jim had none of the tricks of a declaimer;
but with jerks of unstudied emphasis he repeated familiar lines until
you were conscious of new meaning and strength. He was sitting with his
chair tilted against the wall, and his heels resting on a round, and
his hands clasped about his knees. His eyes were fixed upon the evening
gloom as he recited:


     Man's inhumanity to man
     Makes countless thousands mourn.


The verses seemed exactly to fit his mood, for he repeated them again
and again, with lingering liking for their sense and alliteration.

Jerry broke in abruptly here with sudden, unmeasured condemnation
of the dulness of evenings in a country town in the absence of the
theatre, pronounced theátre. The drama had fired his imagination for
the moment, for he broke through his wonted reserve and waxed fluent as
he expressed his views:

"When I go to the theátre, I go to laugh. I want to see pretty girls
and lots of them, and I want to see them dance. I want songs as I can
understand the words of, and lots of jokes, and horse-play. You don't
get me to the theátre to see no show got up by Shakespeare, nor any
of them fellows as lived two thousand years ago. What did they know
about us fellows as is living now? Pete, you mind that Tim Healy in the
union, him that's full of wind in the meetings? Onct he give me a book
to read, and he says it's a theátre piece wrote by Shakespeare, and the
best there was. I read more'n an hour on that piece, and I'm damned if
there was a joke into it, nor any sense neither."

We were presently yawning under the stars, and I was more than
glad when the men spoke of bed. Almost in the next moment, to my
consciousness, Mrs. Flaherty was knocking on the door, bidding us wake
and not to go to sleep again, for it was six o'clock.

Of the five, this second day was the hardest. My body was sore in
every part when I began to work, and the help of hardening muscles I
did not gain until the third day. Mrs. Flaherty had skilfully bound
up the slight wounds on my fingers. The merciful rain came twice to
our relief, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. But this
was not an unmixed blessing, for in the minutes of delay we could but
calculate the growing loss in wages, and watch the sure vanishing of
any surplus above actual living expenses. I remember making an estimate
on my way to my lodgings that evening, and it was with much sinking of
heart that I discovered that my earnings made a total rather less than
the cost of the day's living.

There has been difficulty in the way of intercourse with the men. I
speak no Italian, nor any of the Scandinavian tongues, so that my
acquaintance has been confined to my own countrymen, who are few in
number in the gang, and to the Irishmen and negroes, and an occasional
Hungarian who understands my stammering German. And within the
English-speaking circle, in the absence of this, there have been other
barriers. There is wanting that social freedom that is most natural
in Mrs. Flaherty's home. There is much of it among the foreigners.
They hang together at their work, and sit in separate groups through
the noon hour, and one commonly hears, especially among the Italians,
that picturesque volubility which sets you wondering as to the subject
of such fluent debate. Among the English-speaking men, the Irish and
negroes are as Jews and Samaritans; but aside from this, the general
attitude is one of sullen suspiciousness. Few appear to know the
others, and not even their wretchedness draws them to the relief of
companionship. Sometimes we hear warm greetings among acquaintances,
or see some show of friendliness, but this is markedly out of keeping
with the general tone of things. The usual intercourse is an exchange
of experiences, an account of the circumstances which brought them to
their present lot, among men who happen to be working side by side or
sitting in company at the noon hour. Quite as commonly one hears only
muttered curses against the boss.

You would gather from their own accounts that many of the men are
unused to unskilled labor. There is a singular uniformity in their
histories. Nearly all have seen better days, and are now but tiding
over a dull season in their trades, or are earning enough to take them
to some other part of the country, where there is a quickening in the
demand for their labor.

I found myself growing doubtful of these unvarying tales. The mechanism
became too apparent. "I am really an efficient and energetic workman,"
each seemed to say; "you see me now in a strait of circumstances. You
should see me at my trade, in which I am an adept. I am out of that
employment now because of depression in the business, but when business
revives, or when I can reach Chicago or St. Louis or Minneapolis, my
labor will be in strong demand." Irresistibly one is led to the belief
that most of these men probably have no trade, or, at the best, are
inefficient workmen, who, unable to keep a job long, habitually pick up
a living at work like this, in the careless makeshift of a shiftless
life.

It is refreshing to meet others who are frankly laborers. All their
lives they have been bred to unskilled labor, and they make no pretence
of anything different. They are hard men who look out upon a world that
is hard to them at every point of contact; but they are true men, by
virtue of their honesty and directness, and one likes them accordingly.
Some of them are old, and it is pitiful to see them tottering under the
burden of years, and staying off actual want by forcing their rheumatic
limbs through the drudgery of this rude toil.

I had noticed the absence of one of this coterie for a day or two when,
in the middle of a morning's work, he appeared among the ruins. He was
an old Irishman. His face was swollen from toothache, and was bound up
in a cotton bandanna. His hands were clasped on his stooping back, and
he moved with the painful motion that suggests acute rheumatism. For a
time he stood watching us at our work and exchanging words with some
of the men about his complaints, when suddenly he burst into tears.
The men jeered him, and angrily told him to be gone. I had a sickening
feeling of cruelty as I saw him go sobbing down the road; but when I
spoke of him at the noon hour the men explained that it was a disgrace
to have him crying there, but that they would see that his wants were
provided for.

There was a revelation in the discovery of the degree to which
profanity is ingrained in the vernacular of these men, as
representatives of the laboring poor. They swear with the readiness
of instinct, not merely in anger, when their language mounts to a
torrent of abuse unspeakably awful in its horrid blasphemies, but in
commonest intercourse, when their oaths are as meaningless as casual
interjections. And almost never is the rude hardness of their speech
softened by the amenities which seem so natural a part of language.
The imperative, more than any other mood, is rudely thrust into common
use. They are even punctilious in its employment.

A single instance will serve to point the nature of this graceless
speech. Two boys of ten or twelve are employed in carrying water to
the men at their work. One carries his bucket through the building to
those engaged in the upper stories; and the other, a flaxen-haired,
delicate child whose thin legs bend under his burden, serves those
of us who are at work on the heaps below. Through all the day, and
especially in its greatest heat, the boys run busily from the works
to a neighboring pump, and return with bucketfuls of water, which are
at once surrounded by thirsty workmen and emptied in a few minutes.
Regardless of the prevailing custom, I always thanked the little fellow
for my drink. Soon I noticed that even this instinctive acknowledgment
seemed to embarrass him. In an interval of rest he came up to me, after
receiving my thanks. "You shouldn't thank me," he said. "And why not?"
I begged to know. "Because, you see, I'm _paid_ to do this," was his
conscientious answer. A mere child, naturally gentle, and yet so bred
to rougher usage that a simple "Thank you" jarred upon his sense of
right! A few minutes later I saw the two boys in a rough-and-ready
fight, and their language lacked none of the horror of that of their
elders.

I shall be on the road again to-morrow morning, and I shall go as
penniless as I came, but somewhat richer in experience. I have been
through nearly a week of labor, and have survived it, and have honestly
earned my living as a working-man. In the future I shall have the
added confidence which comes of knowing that, if work offers, I shall
probably be able to perform it. But this is not the only cause of my
increased light-heartedness. I am frankly glad to get away from the job
on the old Academic building. This is a selfish feeling, and is not
without the cowardice of all selfishness. I hope for a job of another
kind, for a time at least, because I wish to see some hopefuller side
of the lot of common labor. When we draw too near to the hand of Fate,
and begin to feel as though there were a wrong in the nature of things,
it is best, perhaps, to change our point of view--if we can. This may
account for some of the drifting restlessness among working-men of my
class.

The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are
unskilled laborers. We are grown men, and are without a trade. In the
labor market we stand ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere
muscular strength for so many hours each day. We are thus in the lowest
grade of labor. We are here, and not higher in the scale, by reason
of a variety of causes. Some of us were thrown upon our own resources
in childhood, and have earned our living ever since, and by the line
of least resistance we have simply grown to be unskilled workmen.
Opportunities came to some of us of learning useful trades, and we
neglected them, and now we have no developed skill to aid us in earning
a living, and we must take the work that offers.

Some of us were bred to farm labor, and almost from our earliest
recollection we worked in the fields, until, tiring of country life,
we determined to try some other; and we have turned to this work as
being within our powers, and as affording us a change. Still others
among us, like Wilson, really learned a trade; but the market offers no
further demand for the peculiar skill we possess, and so we are forced
back upon skilless labor. And selling our muscular strength in the open
market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions.
It is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve means of
subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a "reserve price."
We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly
speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and as hunger is a matter
of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must
sell at once for what the market offers for our labor. And for some of
us there is other pressure, unspeakable, immeasurable pressure, in the
needs of wife and children.

The contractor buys our labor as he buys other commodities, like brick
and iron and stone, which enter into the construction of the new
building. But he buys of us under certain restrictions to us both. The
law of supply and demand does not apply to our labor with the same
freedom as to other merchandize. We are human beings, and some of
us have social ties, which bricks and iron have not, and we do not,
therefore, move to favorable markets with the same ease and certainty
as these. Besides, we are ignorant men, and behind what we have to sell
is no trained intelligence, nor a knowledge of prices and of the best
means of reaching the best markets. And then we are poor men, who must
sell when we find a purchaser, for no "reserve price" is possible to us.

The law of supply and demand meets with these restrictions and
others. If it applied with perfect freedom to our commodity, we should
infallibly be where is the greatest demand for our labor; and with
perfect acquaintance with the markets we should always sell in the
dearest. But the benefits of perfect freedom of supply and demand would
not be ours alone. If we sold in the dearest markets, the employer
would as certainly buy in the cheapest. He has capital in the form of
the means of subsistence, and can stand off for a "reserve price,"
and could force us to sell at last in the pinch of hunger, and in
competition with starving men.

As matters are, our wages might rise, in an increased demand for labor,
far above their present point; but even under pressure of decreasing
demand, and with scores of needy men eager to take our places, our
wages, if we had employment at all, would not fall far below their
present level. So much has civilization done for us. It does not insure
to us a chance to earn a living, but it does measurably insure to us
that what we earn by day's labor, such as this, will at least be a
living.

As unskilled laborers we are unorganized men. We are members of no
union. We must deal individually with our employer, under all the
disadvantages which encumber our position in the market as compared
with his.

But his position is not an enviable one. He is a competitor in a freer
market than ours. He has secured his contract as the lowest bidder,
under a keener competition than we know, and in every dime that he
must add to wages in order to attract labor, and in every dollar paid
to an inefficient workman, and in every unforeseen difficulty or delay
in the work, he sees a scaling from the margin of profit, which is
already, perhaps, the narrowest that will attract capital into the
field of production. The results of our labor are worth nothing to him
as finished product until given sections of the work are completed. In
the meantime he must advance to us our wages out of capital which is a
product of past labor, his own and ours as working-men, and of other
capital. And this he must continue to do, even if his margin of profit
should wholly disappear, and even if ultimate loss should be the net
result of the expenditure of his labor and capital. In every case,
before any other commodity has been paid for, we have insured to us the
price for which we have sold our labor.

Our employer is buying labor in a dear market. One dollar and sixty
cents for a day of nine hours and a quarter is a high rate for
unskilled workmen. And the demand continues, for I notice that the
boss accepts every man who applies for a job. The contractor is paying
high for labor, and he will certainly get from us as much work as
he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and
thoroughly does he know his business. He has sole command of us. He
never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the débris is
cleared away and the site made ready for the constructive labors of the
skilled workmen. In the meantime he must get from us, if he can, the
utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are
capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should
not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser, for the
market would soon supply him with others to take our places.

We are ignorant men, and we have a slender hold of economic principles,
but so much we clearly see: that we have sold our labor where we could
sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it where he could buy it
cheapest. He has paid high for it, but not from philanthropic motives,
and he will get at the price, he must get, all the labor that he can;
and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as
little as we can. And there you have, in its rudimentary form, the
bear and the bull sides of the market.

You tell us that our interests are identical with those of our
employer. That may be true on some ground unknown to us, but we live
from hand to mouth, and we think from day to day, and we have no power
to "reach a hand through time, to catch the far-off interest of tears."
From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every
element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no personal
pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer.
He plainly shares this lack of unity of interest; for he takes for
granted that we are dishonest men, and that we will cheat him if we
can; and so he watches us through every moment, and forces us to
realize that not for an hour would he intrust his interests to our
hands. There is for us in our work none of the joy of responsibility,
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages
at the end of the week.

We expect the ready retort that we get what we deserve, that no field
of labor was closed to us, and that we are where we are because we
are fit, or have fitted ourselves, for nothing better. Unskilled
labor must be done, and, in the natural play of productive activity,
it must inevitably be done by those who are excluded from the higher
forms of labor by incapacity, or inefficiency, or misfortune, or lack
of ambition. And being what we are, the dregs of the labor market,
and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization
among ourselves, by means of which we can deal with our employer and he
with us by some other than an individual hold upon each other, we must
expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and not only be
directed in our labor, but be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are,
through our tasks.

All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are the hard, barren,
hopeless lives that they are because of our own fault, and that our
degradation as men is the measure of our bondage as workmen.

This seems to state an ultimate fact, and then, with the habit of much
of such thinking, to settle itself peacefully, with an easy conscience,
behind the inevitable.

But for us there is no such peace or comfort in the inevitable. And
yet, even in this statement of our case, we are not without hope. We
are men, and are capable of becoming better men. We may be capable of
no other than unskilled labor, but why should we be doomed to perform
it under the conditions which now degrade us at our work?

Imagine each of us an ideal workman. Through all the hours of the
working-day we labor conscientiously, with no need of oversight beyond
intelligent direction; for each of us feels the keenest interest in the
progress of the work, because we are honest men, and, with far-sighted
knowledge, we know that by our best labor in any form of useful
production we are contributing our best to the general prosperity, as
well as our own, and that it is by our energy and personal efficiency
that we may open for ourselves a way to promotion. Here clearly is a
solution on ideal grounds. Is there no remedy that can reach us as we
are?

Our ambition must be fired, our sense of responsibility awakened and
enlisted in our labor, our intelligences quickened to the vision of our
own interests in the best performance of our duty. Life will not be
rendered frictionless thereby. Work will still be hard, but to it will
be restored its dignity, its power to call into play the better part of
a man, and so build up his character.

We have already seen how such an end is realized in the initial
betterment of character itself. Let us see whether something might not
be done by an initial improvement in the conditions of employment.

Let us suppose now that we are not ideal characters, but ordinary men,
whose lot in life is to perform unskilled labor; but let us suppose
that we are an organized body of workmen. The contractor made terms
with us as an organized gang for the removal of the old building. Our
organization, from long experience of such work, was able to enter into
an eminently fair agreement. The contract rests upon a basis of time.
For the completed work we are to receive a fixed sum, provided that
it is finished by a given date. If we finish the work, according to
the terms of the contract, one week earlier, we are to receive a bonus
in addition to the fixed amount; if two weeks earlier, there will be
an increase in the bonus. In the meantime advances are to be made to
us, week by week, in the form of days' wages, but so regulated as to
protect the contractor against loss if the gang should fail to complete
the work.

Every member of the gang is perfectly familiar with the terms of the
contract, and knows thoroughly the advantages of an early completion
of the job. We agree among ourselves upon the number of hours which
shall constitute a day's work, and from our own number we elect a
boss, who will give direction to our labor, and under whose orders we
bind ourselves to serve. It is no part of his duty now to stand guard
over us in the office of a slave-driver to prevent our shirking, for
we effectually perform that service for ourselves, seeing to it, with
utmost regard for our interests, that no man among us fails to do his
share in the common task. The boss is now the best and most intelligent
worker among us, and not only does he direct our efforts, but, with his
own hands, he sets the example of energetic work for the securing of
the best terms that the contract offers for our common good.

In a true sense now we have got a job. It is ours. The work is hard,
but we have an object in working hard. Every stroke of labor is not
a listless, time-serving economy of effort, but an eager and willing
furthering of the work toward its completion and our own advantage. We
are glad in the progress of our job, even if we are glad from no higher
motive than our personal profit. We have a sense of responsibility and
the keen interest which comes of that, even if they rise in no better
source than our greed for gain.

It is true that the root of the matter lies deeper than this. We may
work under hopefuller conditions and be, intrinsically, no better
men. Our selfishness may take on the refinement of the altruism that
merely seeks our own in the welfare of others; our ignorance may
become illumined by an enlightened self-interest; our vices may assume
respectability; and yet our old hardness of heart remain in full
possession of us. But the truly pertinent question is this: Nearer to
which of these ways of living lies the living way? In which have we the
better chance to become better men? Life in its present course is to
most of us a miserable bondage. We work daily to physical exhaustion;
and, with no power left for mental effort, our minds yield themselves
to the play of any chance diversion until they lose the power of
serious attention. In what constitutes for us the work of life there is
no pleasure, no education, no evoking of our better natures.

All truly productive labor performed under right conditions is itself
a blessing. It partakes of the highest good that life offers. It is
a bringing of order out of chaos, a victory over forces which can be
reduced from evil mastery to useful service. It thus becomes the type
of that labor which is the work of life, the mastery of self in the
building of character. In this sense it was that the monks of the
Middle Ages framed their motto, _Laborare est Orare_--labor is prayer.
But robbed of its true conditions and reduced to the dishonor of
time-service under the eye of a slave-driving boss, who impels us with
insults infinitely more degrading than the lash, labor is no longer
prayer, but a blasphemy, which finds expression in the words which rise
readiest to our lips.

I have been writing from the position of an unskilled workman, with no
apparent allowance for my newness to the life. The physical stress and
strain, for example, how different my experience of these as compared
with that of the other men inured to them by long habit! A year or two
of such labor, and how great the physical change! My hands would be
hard, and the friction of this work, so far from wounding them, would
render them the more impervious to harm. My muscles would be like iron,
and would lend themselves with far greater ease to the stress of manual
labor. Ten years would find me a seasoned workman.

But under conditions of labor such as these, what changes other than
physical would there be? My body might be hardened in fibre to the
point of high efficiency in manual labor, but the hardening of mind
and character--is it likely that this would be of the nature of the
strength of more abundant life, or of the hardness of petrifaction?

I have received the strangest kindness from the men, the most tactful
treatment of me as a novice. They laughed at my strenuous efforts to
do what was so much easier to them, and they laughed when the boss
singled me out for abuse, but never ill-naturedly, I thought. And those
who made up to me, and with whom I picked up acquaintance, showed
the kindest consideration. They never pressed me with embarrassing
questions, but fell gracefully into the easy assumption that I was a
factory hand or a "tradesman" out of a job. It was natural to adopt the
general strain and speak of plans which involved my going West.

In spite of their roughness and hardness of manner and speech, one
never felt the smallest fear of these men, and you had a growing
feeling that their better natures were never far to seek. And yet in
reality here they were, a cursing, blaspheming crew; men upon whose
lives hopelessness seems to have settled; whose idea of work is a
slavish drudgery done from the instinct of self-preservation and to be
shirked whenever possible; whose idea of pleasure is abandonment to
their unmastered passions.

I had a purpose in quitting work in the middle of Saturday afternoon.
I went to my lodgings and asked Mrs. Flaherty for an early supper of
anything that she could give me without trouble. Then I brushed my
clothes and washed myself, and made myself as presentable as my slender
pack permitted. My beard was now of nearly two weeks' growth, and
my face was well burned by the sun, and my clothes, in spite of the
protection of overalls, were much labor-stained.

I felt some security in my disguise, and after an early supper I walked
over to see the sunset parade. On the road I met the men returning from
the works, and had to run a gauntlet of questions as to whether I had
left the job for good, and what I meant to do.

There was bustle in the camp; a running to and fro of cadets, who
appeared to be subject to many calls; a nervous appearing and vanishing
at the tent-doors of figures which were in process of achieving
parade-dress; a hasty personal inspection of arms and uniform; and then
suddenly, out of apparently inextricable confusion, there emerged,
without a trace of disorder, the two companies, in double lines of
perfect symmetry, before the inspecting officer.

Then followed the sunset parade. Seated on the benches under the trees,
and grouped on the turf behind, was an eager crowd watching intently,
in perfect stillness, every evolution of the cadets. The fascination
was in the sense it gave you of abounding life, of youth and strength
and vigor, brought to perfect unity in willing subordination to
authority. Here was the type of highest organization, the voluntary
submission of those who are "fit to follow to those who are fittest
to lead." So much has civilization achieved for the purpose of
self-defence. The mission of many of these young officers will be to
take such men as those with whom I have been working, and teach them
the manly lesson of obedience, and awaken in them the feelings of
courage and loyalty and _esprit de corps_. Civilization is yet a long
way from such organization for industrial ends, if ever such corporate
action will be possible or good; but certainly it will not belong
before civilization gives birth in increasing numbers to "captains of
industry," who will feel with their men other ties than the "_nexus_
of cash payment," and who will attack the problems of production with
other aims than selfish accumulation. Under the direction of such
leaders, workingmen will be led to far greater conquests over the
resources of nature than any in the past, and, sharing consciously in
these victories as the fruits of their own labors, there will open
to them a new life of liberty and hope in willing allegiance to true
control.

The intense satisfaction I felt in the rest of yesterday (Sunday) was
heightened by a feeling of hopefulness as I thought of the future of
workingmen in a country like ours. Here are almost boundless natural
resources, capable of supporting many times our present population.
Under the stimulus of private acclamation, what marvellous genius and
skill and enterprise have directed labor to the development of our
national wealth! When, with the growth of better knowledge, there is
added to this stimulus among the great leaders of industry a sincere
desire for the common good and a purpose to make the conditions of
employment the means of achieving this good, how far greater must be
the industrial results, and how far better the lives of the workers!

I felt aglow with this idea as I walked, in the afternoon, down the
road below Highland Falls. It was a warm mid-summer day, and in keeping
with its restful quiet the air moved gently among the leaves in the
tree-tops. I was disturbed by the sound of music from the deck of an
excursion steamer, and, seized with sudden desire for a glimpse of the
river, I vaulted a low stone wall, and quickly made my way over the
mossy carpeting of a wood which covers the bluff above the water.

I did not see, at first, the abrupt ending of the wood and the sweep of
an open lawn, and when I caught sight of that I was only a few yards
from a rustic bench. There two persons sat, with their backs toward me,
but I recognized the girl at once as an acquaintance, and I knew that
I was a trespassing vagrant. The man I knew well, for he was a college
classmate and a charming fellow, and I longed to ask his views on the
question of the improvement of the lot of unskilled laborers by means
of organization.

But I grew painfully conscious of my work-stained clothes, and my faded
flannel shirt, and the holes in my old felt hat, and of how all these
marked me as belonging now to another world. And so I quietly stole
away and returned to "mine own people."




CHAPTER III

A HOTEL PORTER


THE HIGHLANDS, ORANGE COUNTY, N. Y.,
Tuesday, 25 August, 1891.

I am now a hotel porter. More strictly, I have just resigned my
position, and with the net proceeds of three weeks' wages, which amount
to four dollars and two cents, I am ready to make a fresh start in the
early morning. The leisure of this last evening at the hotel I shall
give to the task of summing up the fragmentary notes which I have made
in such chance hours of rest as were to be had in a service which has
kept me on duty from five o'clock in the morning until eleven at night.

Why I have lingered here so long I scarcely know. The time has flown
with amazing swiftness. I soon found my new job easily within my
powers, as compared with the last one, and I have felt a certain
restful security which has held me here for longer than I meant
to stay. But I am ready enough to set out now, and I feel again a
"yearning for the large excitement" that comes of life upon the open
highway, and the chances of a living earned by the work of my hands.

I am not twenty miles beyond my last station at Highland Falls. It was
raining when I left Mrs. Flaherty's home, and she pleaded with me to
stay; but I had nothing with which to pay for further entertainment,
and I certainly had not the courage to return to the job on the old
Academic building. And so we parted, Mrs. Flaherty standing with arms
akimbo in the open door of her cottage, a final protest against so rash
a venture as her last word, while I lifted my hat to her and to Minnie,
who peered at me from the shadow of the passage behind her mother.

It must be owned that the prospect was not encouraging to my new
departure. At intervals of less than a mile, sometimes, I was driven
to seek refuge from the rain. The mountain-road was soft with mud,
and a secure footing was a fruitless search. In the hot air the heavy
dampness added to the discomfort of walking. Only in a general way
I knew that the road would lead me eventually over the Highlands to
Middletown, which lies in my westward course. The beauty of the country
was lost upon me, for the mountain was cloaked in a heavy fog, and
all that rose visible were short, succeeding sections of muddy road,
bordered with forests of oak and hickory-nut and chestnut, with matted
weeds growing thick to the wagon-tracks, and clumps of blackberry
bushes standing here and there along the lines of tottering stone walls
and wooden fences.

In the middle of the noon hour I reached Forest-of-Dean Mines. A
general supply store stands on the roadside. It was thronged with
Italian laborers. I waited in its shelter until the one-o'clock whistle
recalled the men to their work, and then I made terms with an Italian
boy, who was left in charge, for a five-cent dinner. The child spoke
English with perfect readiness. Almost concealed behind the counter,
he looked wonderfully important and business-like as he reached up to
apply the weights and fixed his great black eyes shrewdly upon the
oscillations of the balance. For five cents he agreed to give me two
ounces of cheese and six soda-crackers.

This proved a hopelessly inadequate dinner, and by the middle of the
afternoon I was painfully hungry. It must have been between the hours
of three and four when, on a stretch of level road, I met a tall,
over-grown negro youth with a bucket of sour milk in each hand, which
was plainly destined for a pig-pen that I had passed but a few yards
back. Looming dimly in the fog behind him, I could see the outlines of
a large frame structure with lightly built verandas engirding it. I
asked the youth what it was, and learned that it was a hotel, the "----
House."

'Did he think that I could get a job there?' He was doubtful of that,
but advised my seeing the "boss," whom I should find in the office. The
office was deserted when I entered it. Some men were playing billiards
in the larger room beyond, which, with the office, forms the ground
floor of a building detached from the main hotel, but joined by a
veranda on the upper story.

I sat down, and began to dry my feet at a slow fire which burned
in an iron stove. Presently there came in a tall man, straight of
figure, with black eyes and hair and mustache and an uncommonly dark
complexion. I rose with an inquiry for the proprietor, and he sat
down with the assurance that he was the man. There were two definite
requests in my mind. I meant to apply first for a job; but, expecting
nothing of a permanent character, I resolved to ask work for the
remaining afternoon for the sake of food and a night's shelter from the
rain. To my surprise, instead of the negative I expected to my first
request, I found some encouragement in the proprietor's manner. He
owned to the need of a porter until the arrival, in a few days, of the
man who had been engaged for that position. I declared my willingness
to serve and to begin work on the moment. He pointed out that he did
not know me, and that he was not in the habit of engaging servants whom
he did not know. 'Besides, there was not much for the porter to do, and
for his services he was paid at the rate of eight dollars a month and
his board.' I was ready with a plea for a trial, if only for a single
day, and presently the proprietor consented.

He rose, and at once began to instruct me in my duty. Standing on the
threshold between the office and billiard-room, he pointed to the
bare floors, and explained that they must be scrubbed every morning.
He then indicated the score or more of oil-lamps with which the rooms
were lighted, and said that these must be kept clean and filled. Next
he opened a door from the office into a small room in which was a cot.
That was to be my sleeping-place, and he showed me, in one corner,
buckets and a mop and a broom, which were intended for the porter's
use. Quite abruptly he asked to see my hat, and, wondering at the
request, I showed him the stained black felt with ragged holes in the
crown. "That won't do," he said, and with the word he took down from
a peg a porter's cloth cap with a patent-leather visor, and bade me
wear it at my work. It was much too small, but by dint of holding my
head with care I could keep it on; thus balancing the cap as best I
could, and with the broom in hand, I followed my employer for further
instructions. He led the way to the verandas, and explained that they
must be swept each morning before the guests are up, and again in the
afternoon, at the hour when they are least in use. They were nearly
deserted now, and the proprietor told me to begin my work by sweeping
them, and then he left me.

I could have danced with sheer delight. Not if I had deliberately
planned it could I have effected a better arrangement. It fitted
my needs exactly. A change to lighter work for a time was almost a
necessity; for my hands were much blistered and torn, and they refused
to heal under the friction of my last employment. And then--and my
spirits rose buoyantly to this idea--here was a chance to see something
of domestic service, and such another, under conditions so favorable,
might not offer in all my journey across the continent.

"This morning," I thought to myself, "I was a roving laborer in search
of work and with but ten cents in my pocket; now I am a hotel porter,
with bed and board assured and an open field for observation, and some
certainty of a surplus, regardless of the weather, when I quit the job,
although, at its present rate, my daily wage is a fraction less than
twenty-seven cents."

As I swept the verandas my plans began to form themselves with exciting
interest. "Here is clearly a splendid opportunity. I have been frankly
told that a porter is already engaged, and is on his way, and that
my occupancy of office is simply for the interregnum. Plainly, if I
can give evidence, in the meantime, of usefulness such that, when the
regular porter comes, I shall be continued in some employment about the
hotel, that will be a distinct achievement; and it will not be without
a bearing upon the practical question as to what a penniless man may
do for himself in the way of winning permanent employment that offers
chances of promotion." I resolved to bend all my energies to that.

When the verandas were swept, I returned to the office and
billiard-room, and began to study the field. The floors were sadly in
need of scrubbing; many of the lamp chimneys were smoked, and all were
far from clean; the windows of both rooms were much weather-stained;
and the paint on the woodwork could be improved by a thorough washing.
I then went over the grounds, and found the walks in disorder, and the
lawns matted and strewn with litter.

I lit the lamps at nightfall, and awaited a summons to supper. While
in the region of the kitchen I noticed that an extra hand might often
prove of service there. Back in my own domain for the evening, I found
my offices in demand in attendance upon the billiard and pool tables.

By eleven o'clock the house was still, and I was at liberty to go to
bed. Among the furniture in the office was an alarm-clock. This I wound
up, and set for a quarter to five.

The morning was splendidly bright. When I stepped out upon the veranda
the sun had already cleared the tops of the wooded Highlands, and, with
the radiance reflected from infinite rain-drops in the forests, there
rolled from their "gorgeous gloom" the "sweet after showers, ambrosial
air." In no direction was the outlook wide; but the air gleamed in the
sunlight with the crystal clearness which gives its peculiar quality
to our autumn, and which so early as August can be had only at
considerable altitudes.

But the scrubbing awaited me, and was a task of much uncertainty. In
the kitchen I filled my buckets with water--cold water, I am sorry to
say. I threw wide open the doors and windows, and first sprinkled the
floors, as I had seen shopkeepers do, and then swept them thoroughly. I
tried to apply the water by means of a mop with a long wooden handle;
but failing completely in that, I detached the handle, and getting
down on my knees, I went carefully over the surface with the mop in
hand. Frequently I changed the water, and when the scrubbing was done I
looked the damp floors over with immense satisfaction.

Until I was called to breakfast I spent the time in sweeping the
verandas and clearing from the walks the twigs and dead leaves with
which they were strewn after the rain. In no way was I prepared for
the alarming surprise which was in store for me. When I returned to
the office I stood aghast at the sight of the newly scrubbed floors.
They were dry now, and were covered with fantastic designs. Every final
movement of the mop was distinctly traceable in streaks of unmistakable
dirt. And there was the proprietor at work at his desk, and he faintly
noticed me as I entered. I stood expecting my discharge, with what
fortitude I could summon, but receiving no further attention from my
employer, I hurried back to the work on the walks and drives. During
the dinner-hour I brought a broom to bear upon the coiling traceries on
the floor, and succeeded in softening their bolder outlines.

But scrubbing proved a peculiarly difficult art. On the second morning
I did all that I had done before, and then got buckets of clean hot
water and a fresh mop; and on hands and knees I went over the floors,
wiping them up with scrupulous care. The result was no better, once
dry, and the designs in daubs of dirt were as fantastic as ever. On
the third morning I tried still a new plan, but only with the result
of effecting a change in the designs. I was learning to scrub by an
empirical process, and the fourth venture approached success. Hot
water and soap, and a scrub-brush vigorously applied, and then a final
swabbing, left the floors comparatively clean, and free from the
persistent mop-stains.

Only one more of my duties I found difficult of mastery. Like scrubbing
the floors, washing the windows was full of surprises. From one of
the house-maids I learned that clean, hot, soapy water was the prime
necessity. I was delighted with the first result, for after the washing
within and without, I had visions of the glass in a high state of clean
transparency. But the sun had absorbed the water, and left stains
of tenacious soap, when I came to the polishing, and after hours of
labor I almost despaired of ever bringing the panes to a reasonably
untarnished condition.

The work has varied so little in detail that the history of a single
day is an epitome of the three weeks' service:

I am up at a little before five in the morning. The floors of the
office and billiard-room are my first concern; and by the time these
are scrubbed it is six o'clock. The _chef_ early noticed my willingness
to lend a hand in the kitchen, and he rewards me with a liberal supply
of hot water every morning, and a cup of coffee and a slice of bread at
six o'clock when he takes his own. Fortified in this way, I sweep the
verandas and walks, and rake the drives and lawns until breakfast.

There is a curious, horizontal, social cleavage among the "help."
I belong to the lower stratum. I first noticed the distinction at
our meals. The negro head-waiter, and the pastry-cook, and the
head-gardener, and the company of Irish maids, who do double duty
as waitresses and house-maids, take their meals in the dining-room
after the guests are served. The remnants of these two servings are
then heaped upon a table in a long, low, dimly lighted room which
intervenes between the kitchen and dining-room, and there we of the
lowest class help ourselves. Our coterie consists of an English maid, a
recent arrival from Liverpool, who serves as a dishwasher, three negro
laundresses, two negro stable-boys and myself, with a varying element
in two or three hired men, who drop in irregularly from the region of
the barns.

Martha, the English maid, is chiefly in charge here, and she bravely
tries to serve, and to bring some order out of the chaos; but the task
is beyond her. We take places as we find them vacant, and each helps
himself from what remains to be eaten of the fragments of the meal just
ended. There is always a towering supply, but an abundance of a sort
that deadens your appetite, like the blow of a sand-bag.

I reproached myself with fastidiousness at first, and imagined that to
the other servants, who shared it, the fare was entirely palatable; and
so I was surprised when, at a dinner early in my stay, one of the negro
laundresses seized a plate heaped with scraps of meat, from which we
had all been helping ourselves, and carried it out with the indignant
remark that it was fit only for the dogs, adding, sententiously, as she
disappeared through the door: "We are not dogs _yet_; we are supposed
to be human." And back to her afternoon's work she went, although she
had eaten only a morsel.

These meals were curiously solemn functions; scarcely a word was ever
spoken. Martha was "cumbered about much serving," and very heroically
she tried to impart some decent order to the meal, and a cheerfuller
tone to the company. I never knew the cause of the sullen unsociability
which possessed us, whether it was ill-humor born of the physical
weariness from which all the servants seemed constantly to suffer as a
result of the high pressure of work at the height of the season, or the
revolting fare which often sent us unrested and unfed from our meals.

It is the vision of supper that will linger clearest in my memory. The
long, reeking room seen faintly in the yellow light of one begrimed
oil-lamp; the ceiling so low that I can easily reach it with my
upstretched hand, and dotted over with innumerable flies. The room
is a paradise for flies, which swarm most in our food that lies in
ill-assorted heaps down the middle of a rough wooden table. Here we sit
in chance order, black and white faces often alternating; the white
ones livid in their vivid contrast with the background of the room's
deep shadows, and the others ghastly visible in the general blackness
from which gleam the whites of eyes. Sometimes the two stable-boys find
seats together; and then they bid defiance to the general gloom, and
are soon bubbling over with musical laughter, that rolls responsive to
the least remark from either. It is interesting at such times to watch
Martha's face. The nervous energy which is always struggling there
against a look of utter weariness shines victorious now, in the light
of a new hope that a better cheer has come at last to her table.

From breakfast I hurry back to the work of putting the grounds in
order. The walks I sweep every morning, and then rake the drives and
the lawns.

It was at this work that I early found convincing proof of the
completeness of my social change. The lawns at certain hours are in
the possession of nurse-maids and infants. I have never calculated
the number of children in the hotel, but their ages apparently mark
every stage of advance from a few weeks to as many years. My liking
for children amounts to reverent devotion, and it gave me a shock,
from which I have not recovered, to find that, unshaven and uncouth in
workmen's clothes, I had become for them a bogey with whom their nurses
frighten them into obedience, warning them in excited tones with "Here
comes the man to take you away!"

It was at this work, too, that I once incurred the avowed displeasure
of a guest. She was a beautiful Philistine, with a keenly penetrating
twang and turns of speech that bespoke the regions of Sixth Avenue and
Fourteenth Street. But she was remarkably handsome, tall and graceful,
and of high-bred bearing and of a thoroughly aristocratic type. It must
be confessed that whenever she was visible from my regions the section
of the grounds which commanded a view of her, and was yet fairly
beyond the sound of her voice, received assiduous attention from me;
for she was highly remunerative to look at. I was sweeping a section
of the walk immediately in front of the hotel. Unlike the work at
West Point, a porter's duties do not preclude mental effort. Absorbed
in thought and quite unconscious of my surroundings, I was suddenly
recalled to them and to my station in life by nasal accents raised
in strong reproof. I looked up in bewilderment, and saw confronting
me the beautiful Philistine, holding a little child by each hand.
Very straight she stood and bright-eyed, with her head thrown back,
and an exquisite flush over her face, and her beautiful lips curled
in anger, as she scolded me roundly for raising so much dust. I was
unfamiliar with the etiquette of the situation, so I held my peace, and
respectfully touched my cap, inwardly calling her the beauty that she
was as she stood there, and ardently hoping that she would scold me
more.

[Illustration: I HELD MY PEACE, AND RESPECTFULLY TOUCHED MY CAP,
INWARDLY CALLING HER THE BEAUTY THAT SHE WAS.]

From the lawns I go to the kitchen, and offer my services to the
_chef_. Usually he has ready for me a basket of potatoes to peel. In a
little shed by the kitchen-door I sit and peel endlessly. The servants
are flocking in and out through the open door in the fetid air. The
heat is of the suffocating kind, in which the heavy air lies dead.
It is nearing the dinner-hour, and everyone must work with almost a
frenzy of effort. The high tension communicates itself to us all, and
we feel the nervous strain upon our tempers. The hundred and one petty
annoyances which cause the friction of household service prove too
much, and the tension bursts into a furious quarrel between the Irish
pastry-cook and the negro head-waiter. No one has time to heed them,
but his storming oaths and her plaintive, whining key, maintained with
provoking tenacity, whatever relief they bring to them, are far from
soothing to the rest of us.

The maids are gathered from all parts of the hotel. Most of them have
been on duty since six o'clock, and after the morning's work there
now awaits them the rush of serving dinner. Want of sufficient sleep
and utter physical weariness have drawn deep lines in their faces.
Presently one of them, a slender young girl, sinks exhausted into a
seat, and we hear her notion of the _summum bonum_: "Oh, I wish I was
rich, and could swing all day in a hammock!" I follow the direction
of her eyes. Across a wide stretch of lawn and in the shade of some
clustering maples I see the gleam of a white dress rocking gently in a
hammock, and I catch the flutter of a fan and the light on an open page.

Sometimes I am in the region of the kitchen during the dinner-hour
itself. As an experience, I fancy that it is not unlike that of being
behind the scenes in the course of the play. The kitchen and pantry
are ill-ventilated, and are hot to suffocation. About a counter-like
partition which separates the two rooms crowd the eager waitresses,
rehearsing in shrill tones their orders to the _chef_ and his
assistant. There is a babel of voices striving to be heard, and a
ceaseless clatter of dishes, and a hurrying to and fro. The _chef_ is
not a bad fellow, but his temper is rarely proof against the harassing
annoyances incident upon serving a dinner, and he loses it in a torrent
of oaths. The volume of noise increases until the height of dinner is
reached and passed, and then it subsides, quite like a thunder-storm.

The afternoon's work keeps me, for the most part, in my own
regions. The lamps must first be cleaned and filled, and then the
billiard-tables brushed for the evening play, and there may remain
unfinished work on the grounds, which claims me until it is time to
sweep the verandas again.

When I am out of the office I must be careful that the doors and the
windows are open, and my ears attentive to the bell; for I am porter
and bell-boy in one.

A bell-boy is sometimes at a disadvantage. He is not supposed to
explain, and circumstances may wrong him.

The bell rings. I run to the indicator, and then climb to the door that
bears the corresponding number. A lady asks for a pitcher of ice-water.
Unluckily the ice-chest is locked, and the key, I learn, is in the
keeping of the head-waiter. After hasty search, I find that official
seated on a rock in the shade behind the barn, conversing with some of
the hands. He tells me that there is no ice in the chest, and advises
my going to the ice-house. I do so with all possible speed, and am
fortunate enough to find a piece of loose ice not far below the surface
of saw-dust. Back to the kitchen I run with it, wash it, and chop it
into fragments. But all this has taken time; it is very hot, and the
lady, no doubt, is very thirsty. As I hand her the pitcher of water,
her caustic acknowledgment expresses anything but gratitude.

The verandas are no sooner swept for the afternoon than the stage
appears from the station. I must be in attendance to relieve the newly
arrived guests of their lighter luggage and, with the help of one of
the stable-boys, to carry their trunks to their rooms.

It was in such services as these that I met with an insuperable
difficulty. Before I launched upon the enterprise of earning my living
by manual labor I settled it with myself that I would shrink from no
honest work, however menial, that might fall within the range of my
experiment. I confess that, in my present avocation, when it came
to the necessity of cleaning the cuspidors used by a tobacco-eating
gentry, the task was accomplished only after hard setting of teeth,
and much involuntary contraction of muscles. But I hasten to let
fall a veil already too widely drawn from the hidden rites of a
porter's service. The difficulty in point was of another kind, and
had to do with tips. I was not unprepared for the emergency, for the
proprietor had hinted, in our first conversation, with every mark of
embarrassment, and with a tone of apology for the eight dollars a
month, that that amount was sure to be supplemented by gratuities.
It might have been different under other circumstances; but when I
had seen the guests and noted the unmistakable marks of residence in
cheap flats and low-rent suburban cottages, and realized the careful
husbanding of funds and the close calculation which make a summer
outing possible to them, their fees were some degrees beyond the
possible to me.

In the case of the luggage, it was easy to bow acknowledgment and to
decline in favor of Sam, the stable-boy, who, beaming with delight,
stood ready to receive gifts to any amount, and who loved me warmly.
But when I was alone with some guest in the act of a personal service,
the situation created by a proffered fee proved embarrassing to us
both, and was not to be relieved by bows and expressions of sincere
appreciation.

The evening's duties are usually the lighting of the lamps at
nightfall, and assorting the mail that comes in after supper, and
attending the billiard and pool tables, and answering the bell-calls.
Saturday afternoons and evenings are varied with industrious
preparations for extra guests. This makes added demands upon us all,
and the servants dread Sunday as bringing always the severest strain of
the week. My own share of extra work is confined to Saturday afternoon
and evening, when I put up cots, and carry bed-linen and blankets
about, under the orders of the house-keeper, usually until midnight.
And when I go to sleep at last it is on the hay in the barn, for my
room is swept and garnished on Saturday and given up to a guest. It is
no hardship to sleep on the hay, but, through knowledge gained from
the scale of prices posted in the office, I can but understand what an
admirable business arrangement it is for the proprietor to so utilize
my room over Sunday. The added revenue which is thus yielded during my
stay amounts to fifteen dollars, and as the total sum of my wages for
the three weeks is five dollars and sixty-seven cents, the net returns
to the proprietor in service and profit speak well for his management.

But there is other evidence of good management, and in a quarter that
appeals to me more. His treatment of the "help" is so uniformly fair.
I do not like him; but, so far as I know, I am alone in my dislike
among all the servants of the house; and I cannot fail to see that a
feeling of personal loyalty is behind much of the patient, enduring
service to which I have been witness. Only once was there an approach
to a collision between us, and certainly I emerged from that in rather
a ridiculous light.

It was but two or three evenings ago. Usually I have been able to
eat at our table enough at least to deaden appetite, but on that
evening I could eat nothing. As I passed through the pastry-kitchen
on my way back to the office I saw a few pieces of corn-bread which
were apparently to be thrown away. I asked the cook for some, and she
readily told me to help myself. On a flagging near the kitchen-door
I sat down to eat the bread, and the proprietor must have seen me
there in the dim light. I had not finished when the negro head-waiter
came upon me in much excitement. I belong to a lower order of service
than he, but he treats me civilly, and there was nothing more than
nervousness in his manner now.

"You mustn't get cheese from the pantry without leave," he was saying
in high agitation.

I thought that he had gone mad, but he presently made clear that
the proprietor had come to him with the complaint that I was eating
cheese, which is kept in the pantry, and is not intended for the lower
servants. The supper-table had upset me, and the corn-bread which
caused the present trouble had been cold comfort. I was furiously angry
now, hot and aglow with a passion of rage which at that moment was a
splendid sensation. With great civility I thanked the head-waiter, and
explained the mistake, and showed him a fragment of bread still in my
hand, and then asked where I should find the proprietor. He had gone to
the office, and I followed him there, scarcely conscious of touching
the ground. It was close upon the mail-hour, and the office was crowded
with guests. Near the stove stood the proprietor, and he saw me as I
approached him. I was looking him full in the eyes when I told him,
without introductory remarks, that if he had any further criticisms to
offer upon my conduct he was at liberty to bring them directly to me.
If I had had any sense of humor left I should have laughed then at his
appearance, and have forestalled the ridiculous scene, in which, with
a look of distressed embarrassment, he edged toward the door, and I
followed, with my eyes on his, as I treated him to the most cynically
patronizing sentences which I could frame, while the guests looked on
in silence.

Once in the quiet of the veranda, he explained to me that, since he
holds the head-waiter responsible in such matters, he had naturally
complained to him, and added that he was sorry if any mistake had been
made. I pointed out the mistake, and felt the fool that I was, and
spent the evening in a long walk over the hills, returning only in time
to lock up and put out the lights.

As a basis of comparison I have now the two short terms of service at
West Point and here. I received employment at both places as almost
any laborer might have done, and I found in them both the means of
livelihood. But as a servant, I have found more than that. The man who
had been engaged as porter appeared about a week after my arrival. He
proved to be Martha's brother, and a newly landed immigrant. There was
no mistaking the last fact. His peaked countenance, with surviving
traces of ruddy color; his queer pot-hat, that rested on his ears; his
bright woollen tippet, defying the heat; his baggy suit, which had
doubtless served for day and night through all the voyage; his heavy
boots--all proclaimed him the raw material of a new citizen. Nor
could there be a doubt of his kinship with Martha. She stood with me
awaiting the stage, directing eager glances down the carriage-drive
and excitedly asking questions about its coming. She was the first to
see it, and to recognize her brother on the seat with Sam, and she
fluttered about in the unconcealed delight of affection, perfectly
unconscious of everyone, until her arms were about her brother's neck,
and she was leading him away to the kitchen.

Nothing was said to me about leaving; Martha's brother became her
assistant as a dishwasher, and learned to lend a generally useful hand
in the kitchen.

And so I had fairly won my place, and had open before me a way of
promotion. Experience alone could disclose the value of the opening;
but the "---- House" is a winter as well as a summer resort, and
a porter's services are therefore in demand through the year. If
efficient, intelligent labor could not eventually win higher and more
responsible position in such an enterprise, and possibly gain, at last,
an interest in the business, the case is surely exceptional.

It is the change in external conditions and its bearing upon me as a
human worker which have most impressed me, in contrast with my first
experience.

I worked for nine hours and a quarter at West Point, and had, at the
end of the day's labor, if the weather had been good, eighty-five cents
above actual living expenses. Here I have usually worked from five
o'clock in the morning until eleven at night, at all manner of menial
drudgery, and have gone to bed in the comfortable assurance that, in
addition to food and shelter, I have earned twenty-six cents and a
fraction. And yet, as a matter of choice, purely with reference to the
conditions under which the work is done, I should infinitely prefer a
week of my present duties to a single day at such labor as that at West
Point.

The work here is specific, and it is mine, to be done as I best can.
Responsibility and initiative and personal pride enter here, and render
the eighteen hours of this work incomparably shorter than the nine
hours of my last. It is true that it partakes of the character of much
household service, in that it is ever doing and is never done; but
there is a feeling of accomplishment in the fact of getting my quarters
clean and the grounds in order, and in keeping them so, although it be
at the cost of labor always repeated and never ended.

Perhaps it is because I am still haunted by the thought of the cruel
bondage of unskilled labor, under which men exhaust their powers of
body and mind and soul at work that, in the very conditions of its
doing, seems to harden them into slaves, instead of strengthening them
into men, that I fail to feel keenly the want of time that I can call
my own. I have an independence of vastly better sort in having work
which I can call my own, and which I can do with some human pleasure
and interest and profit in its performance, however hard it may be.

Slender as is my acquaintance with either, I yet see, with perfect
certainty, that the standard of character is higher in this company
of servants than among the gang of unskilled laborers. Other causes
may have a share in this result, but the efficient cause is clear
in the better moral atmosphere in which the work is done. I do not
know how conscious is the feeling of unity of interest with their
employer, or of copartnery with one another in labor, or of personal
responsibility; but all these motives must play a part in effecting the
successful accomplishment of the house-work, with its intricacies and
interdependencies which render constant personal oversight impossible.
Of course the proprietor has much trouble with the "help," and there
are frequent changes among them; but the body of the company remains
the same, and some of the servants have been here for several seasons.

Certainly one is obliged to look elsewhere than to wages for a cause
of better work as showing a finer moral fibre, if I may judge from my
twenty-six cents a day. I dare say that mine is the minimum wage. The
_chef_ told me that he gets sixty dollars a month, and I fancy that his
is the maximum sum. It is purely a guess, but I venture it, that the
average among us would not exceed five dollars a week. Five dollars a
week above the necessaries of life will buy much among the commonest
proletariat. Under certain conditions that, or even a less sum, might
buy industrious and almost continuous effort for fourteen or eighteen
hours a day, but not, I fancy, in the present economic condition of
household servants in this country. There must be other causes to
account for that.

The want of time which is at one's own command is the commonest
objection urged against domestic service as accounting for the ready
choice of harder work with far less of creature comfort, but with
definite limits and entire disposing of the rest of one's day. Stronger
than this, I fancy, as an objection, is a social disability which
attaches to service, and under the sway of which a house-maid has not
the prospect of so good a marriage, socially considered, as a factory
girl, who earns a scanty living, but is subject to no one's command
outside of the factory gates.

The strength of social conventions is a force to be reckoned with among
the working classes. It may seem that below the standing of folk gentle
by birth and breeding there are no social standards or social barriers
of serious strength. I begin to suspect that distinctions are as
clearly made on one side of that line as the other. Very certain I am
that the upper servants here and the nurses and house-maids are removed
from us of the clothes-washing and dish-washing and floor-scrubbing
fraternity by a very considerable social gulf.

A course of eighteen hours of continuous daily duty soon gives one
a surprising relish for the pleasure of doing as you please. I know
now something of the delight of a "Sunday off." I got my first leave
of absence one afternoon when I was allowed to go to the village of
Central Valley to have my boots mended. Not since I was a small boy at
boarding-school have I felt the same vivid pleasure in going freely
forth, knowing that, for the time, I was my own master; and when I
returned to the hotel, it was very much with the school-boy's feeling
of passing again under the yoke.




CHAPTER IV

A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM


WILKESBARRE, PENNSYLVANIA,
Saturday, September 19, 1891.

I have a wide sweep of country to cover from the "---- House" in
the Highlands above the Hudson, where I served as a porter, and
received with my wages a reference to the effect that my work was done
"faithfully and well," to the coal regions of Pennsylvania in the
valley of the Susquehanna.

My spirits rise at every recollection of the journey. For days I walked
through the crisp autumn air, breathing its tingling freshness, and
barely sensible of fatigue.

The way led me over the rich farm-lands of Orange County, and across
the Delaware, and through the lonely wilderness of the Pennsylvania
border, until I emerged upon the hills above the Susquehanna, and
caught sight of the splendid valley, with its native beauty hideously
marred by the blackened trails of forest fires and the monstrous heaps
of culm that mark the mouth of the coal-pits.

So far work has not failed me, unless I mark as an exception the single
case when I began a search, and brought it abruptly to an end by
descending suddenly upon a camping party of friends.

Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other servants, I appeared
among them at the "---- House," and with as little notice I tried to
steal away. Instead of going to the kitchen at five o'clock on that
Wednesday morning for scrubbing-water, I took to the road with my pack,
and left behind me the "---- House" awaking to life in the servants'
quarters.

I had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, and now I wondered what
my next rôle was to be. But the feeling was simply a genial curiosity,
and was free from the timid shrinking with which I set out from the
minister's house in Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls. Then
it was under the spur of self-compulsion that I launched afresh upon
this fortuitous life. With strong animal instinct I had clung to any
haven where shelter and food were secure. Now I warmly welcomed a freer
courage born of experience. Not too sure of newly gained powers, but
like a boy learning to swim, I fancied that I felt the strength of
some confidence in the novel element. Light-hearted in spite of my
pack, which gained weight with every step, I walked briskly along the
country roads, charmed with everything I saw, and feeling sure that my
wages would see me through to another job. Was it a real acquisition,
and had I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this fugitive life?
or did the difference lie in the bracing cool of the morning, and
the beauty of the open country, and the sense of freedom after long
restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that little, hoarded balance in
my purse?

It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, and too late to look for
work. With my eye upon the rows of cottages which line the street by
which I entered the town, I soon found a boarding-house for workmen.
A bed could be had for twenty cents. At a bakery near by I got a loaf
of bread and a quart of milk for a dime, and was thus supplied with a
supper and breakfast. Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell to me that
night, and in the cool of a threatening morning I set out to find work.
The scaffolding about a brick building in process of erection drew
my attention, and I applied for a job as a hod-carrier, but found no
demand there for further unskilled labor. The boss in charge refused
me with some show of petulance, as though annoyed by repeated appeals.
He was not more cheerful, but was politely communicative enough when I
asked after the likelihood of my finding work in the town. "There is
no business doing," he said. "The bottom has fallen out of this place.
There's two men looking for every job here, and my advice to you is to
go somewhere else."

At the head of the street I came upon the foundation work of another
building, which, I learned, was to be an armory. Here the boss
instantly offered me a job, if I could lay brick or do the work of a
mason, but of unskilled labor he said that he had an abundant supply.
"But yonder," he added, "is the Asylum, and much work is in progress on
the grounds, and there, surely, is your best chance of employment."

The Asylum was a State Homœopathic Institution for the Insane. I could
see the large brick buildings on the highest area of spacious grounds,
which spread away in easy undulations, with their natural beauty
heightened by the tasteful work of a landscape gardener.

Near the entrance to the grounds I came upon a large force of laborers
digging a ditch for a water-main. The boss refused me a place, but
not without evident regret at the necessity, and he was at pains to
explain to me that, already on that morning, he had been obliged to
turn away half a dozen men.

It was with no great expectation of success at finding work there
that I began walking somewhat aimlessly through the Asylum grounds.
The first person whom I met was an old Irish gardener. He painfully
stood erect as I questioned him as to whom I should apply for a job,
and supported himself with one hand on my shoulder, while he told me
of the medical superintendent, and the overseer, and the foreman, who
are in charge of various departments of the work. Presently, his face
brightened with excitement as he pointed to a large man who was walking
toward one of the buildings, and he pushed me in his direction with
an eager injunction to apply to him, for he was the overseer of the
grounds.

The overseer listened to my request and read in silence my reference
from the "---- House," and looked me over for a moment, and then
abruptly ordered me to report at seven o'clock on the next morning,
adding, as he disappeared within the building, that he was paying his
men a dollar and a half a day.

The old Irish gardener showed the heartiest pleasure at my success, and
directed me to a boarding-house near the Asylum grounds, where I was
soon settled, and where at noon I ate a memorable dinner, the first
square meal for thirty-six hours, and the first one which had about it
the elements of decent comfort since I left Mrs. Flaherty's table.

At seven o'clock on the next morning I was one of a gang of twenty
laborers who were digging a sewer-ditch. The ditch had passed the
farther edge of a meadow, and must cut its way through the field to
the Asylum buildings, two hundred yards beyond. Its course was marked
by a straight cut through the sod which was to furnish us a guide.
Some of the men took their former places in unfinished portions of the
work, and the rest of us fell apart, leaving intervals of about three
yards from man to man. With the cut as a guide, and with the single
instruction to keep the ditch two feet wide, we began to wield our
picks and shovels. A thick, unmoving fog lay damp upon the meadow,
already saturated with dew. The sun-rays, gathering penetrating power
as they pierced the fog, were soon producing the effect of prickly
heat. This atmosphere, surcharged with moisture and lifeless in its
sluggish weight, yet quick with stinging heat, was a medium in which
the actual work done was out of proportion to its cost in potential
energy. In the forceful Irishism of one of the laborers: "It was a
muggy morning, and a man must do his work twice over to get it done."

By dint of strenuous industry and careful imitation of the methods
of the other men, I managed to keep pace with them. I saw from the
first that the work would be hard; and in point of severity it proved
all that I expected, and more. To ply a pick and urge a shovel for
five continuous hours calls for endurance. Down sweeps your pick with
a mighty stroke upon what appears yielding, presentable earth, only
to come into contact with a rock concealed just below the surface,
a contact which sends a violent jar through all your frame, causing
vibrations which end in the sensation of an electric shock at your
finger-tips. A few repetitions of this experience are distinctly
disheartening in effect. Besides, the sun has cleared the fog, and is
shining full upon us through the still air. The trench is well below
the surface, now, and we work with the sun beating on our aching backs,
and our heads buried in the ditch, where we breathed the hot air heavy
with the smell of fresh soil, and the sweat drips from our faces upon
the damp clay.

By nine o'clock what strength and courage I have left seem oozing from
every pore. The demoralization is complete, and I know that only "the
shame of open shame" holds me to my work. I dig mechanically on through
another sluggish hour of torment; and then I come to, and find myself
breathing deeply, with long regular breaths, in the miracle of "second
wind," with fresh energy flowing like a stream of new life through my
body.

Through all the working hours of the day the foreman sat upon a pile
of tools silently watching us at the job. Now and then he politely
urged that the ditch be kept not less than two feet wide, and nothing
could have been further from his manner and speech than any approach to
abusing the men. It was his evident purpose to treat us well, but the
act of his oversight, under the conditions of our employment, involved
a practical wasting of his day, and cast upon us the suspicion of
dishonesty.

On the next morning, which was Saturday, the foreman sent me down the
ditch, where the pipe was already laid, and ordered me, with two other
men, to fill in the earth. Like a line of earthworks lay the "stubborn
glebe" above the trench. The work of shovelling it back into place
seemed easy at first, and was easy, as compared with the digging; but
the wet, cohesive clay that lined the ditch's brink yielded only to
the pressure of a compulsion very persistently applied. We quit on that
evening at five o'clock, with a full day's pay for nine hours' work.

The foreman met me on Monday morning with an order for yet another
change. At the barn I should find "Hunt," he said, and I was to report
to him as his "help." Hunt proved to be a good-looking, taciturn
teamster, who had just hitched his horses to his "truck," and he
told me to get aboard. The "truck" was a heavy four-wheeled vehicle
without a box, but with, instead, a stout platform suspended from the
axle-trees, and resting but a few inches from the ground. Standing upon
this we drove all day from point to point about the grounds, attending
to manifold needs.

We had first to cart the milk-cans from the dairy to the kitchen. This
errand took us to the rear of the Asylum buildings, where the entries
open upon a series of quadrangular courts. Then from entry to entry we
drove, gathering up great bags of soiled clothes, which lay in heaps
about the doors, and we carted these to the laundry. Then back to the
kitchen we went, and took on a load of huge cans filled with swill, and
transferred them to a large pig-sty at the edge of the wood, below the
meadow, and there emptied their contents into hogsheads, from which,
at stated hours, the swill is baled out to the loud-squealing herd
within. Again we made the round of the entries, this time to gather up
the waste barrels which stood full of ashes, and the results of the
morning's sweeping; and having emptied these, we replaced them for a
fresh supply. Then we drove to the garden, and carted from that quarter
to the kitchen several loads of vegetables.

The afternoon was consumed in supplying the demand for ice. Embedded in
a mass of hay in the ice-house, the ice must first be uncovered, and
the cakes, frozen together, must be pried apart with a crowbar and then
dragged over the melting surface to the door, and finally loaded upon
the truck.

We first carted it to the barn-yard, where we washed it by playing
water over it with a hose, and then to the kitchen wing, where we
chopped it into smaller pieces and threw these into openings which
communicated with the large refrigerators inside. Again and again was
this process repeated, until an adequate supply had been furnished, and
then there remained before six o'clock time enough to cart to the pigs
their evening meal from the kitchen.

With slight changes in detail, this remained the order of our work
through the few days of my stay. I held the job long enough to find
myself ensconced at the Asylum, and then I told the foreman that I
wished to go. He looked at me in some surprise, and began to argue
the point. "You'd better stay by your job," he said. "It is not the
best work, but we'll find better for you before long." I thanked him
heartily, and told him I was interested to learn that, but that I felt
obliged to go. He shook hands with me, and cordially wished me luck,
and told me to apply to him for work if I happened again in those
parts, and added that I could get my wages by calling at the office on
the next afternoon, which was the regular pay-day.

A free day was highly useful now, for my clothes and boots were
seriously in need of repair. The pack contained the means of much
mending, and by dinner-time my coat and trousers were patched, and my
stockings were stoutly darned. But the boots were beyond me. Already
they had cost me dear, for a dollar, the earnings of four days as a
porter, had gone for a pair of new soles, and now another outlay,
enormous in its relation to my means, was an imperative necessity.

I had made an appointment with a cobbler for an early hour in the
afternoon, precisely as one would with a dentist; for while he was at
work on my only pair of boots, I had to sit by in my stocking feet.
Secretly I welcomed the necessity, in spite of its calamitous cost.
I could take a book with me, and read with a clear conscience. The
cobbler was smoking his after-dinner cigar when I entered his shop.
He was little inclined to talk; and when he had finished his smoke he
picked up a boot, and bent over it with an air of absorption. I was
soon lost in my book.

The work was nearly done when some movement of his drew my attention to
the cobbler. I had been struck by his appearance, and now my interest
deepened. Away from his bench it would not have occurred to one to
assign him to that calling. He was an old man, whose muscular figure
had acquired a stoop at the shoulders like that of some seasoned
scholar. His features were clean-cut and strong. His blue eyes had a
look of much shrewdness and force. There were deep lines about his
mouth and in his forehead, which spoke of masterful conflict in life.
Meeting him in the dress of a gentleman, you would have said that he
was a public man of some distinction, and with close acquaintance with
affairs. In reality, he had sat for fifty years upon that bench.
He was growing communicative now; and from his personal history I
tried to divert him to his views of life, thinking that I must have
found a philosopher in a man whose opportunities for reflection had
been so great. But his talk was flowing freely, and would take its
own course, careless of my promptings. I settled myself to listen,
and my interested attention seemed to fire him with new zest. From
personal narrative it was an easy step to events of our national
history, and he warmed to these under the inspiration of the life
of some great man connected with each. General Scott was his first
hero; and touching upon details of his history, which were wholly
unknown to me, he pictured the inborn, warlike spirit of the man with
amazing appreciation, and finally quoted the judgment of the Duke of
Wellington, who, he said, had declared of Scott that, "as a general,
he stood without a superior." Here he paused for a moment to explain
that the Duke of Wellington was a personage of exceptional military
experience, whose judgments in such matters were entitled to the
highest respect.

The Civil War and Mr. Lincoln as the chief figure of those troublous
times next inspired him. It was with no mean insight into the issues
involved that he glowed with the thought of a constitutional question
grown to sharp national conflict, and settled at infinite cost,
and transmitted as a most sacred trust, to be guarded with eternal
vigilance. But the climax was reached when he turned back on his
course, and began afresh, with the Father of his Country as his theme.
The incident of the cherry-tree was repeated with sublime faith, and
with highly dramatic effect. Encouraged by his success and my absorbed
attention, he next recounted the events of that fateful June morning
when the allied American and British forces were nearing Fort Duquesne.
With keenest appreciation of the fatal irony of it, he repeated again
and again his own version of the reply made to the warning of young
Washington by General Braddock: "You young buckskin! you teach a
British officer how to fight?"

A chivalric spirit led him now to speak of "Lady Washington." This
moved him most of all, and when he declared that he would repeat for me
some lines composed by her, which he had learned by heart as a boy, his
emotions were almost beyond control. His job was finished now, and he
drew himself up, and made a strong effort to modulate his voice, which
was trembling with feeling. The lines had an evident magic for him, and
he repeated them with great throbs of emotion, while his eyes grew dim:


     Saw ye my hero?
     Saw ye my hero?

     I saw not your hero;
     But I'm told he's in the van,
     When the battle just began,
     And he stays to take care of his men.

     Oh ye gods! I give you my charge
     To protect my hero, George,
     And return him safe home to my arms.


Then, bending toward me, he placed a trembling hand on my knee; and
looking dimly into my eyes, he said, in husky tones: "And they did,
didn't they?" I assented earnestly, charmed by his sincerity and
enthusiasm, only hopeful that there was some mistake in the unexpected
glimpse of Lady Washington in the character of a poet, and like my
friend struggling with feeling that I found it hard to suppress,
and which expressed, would have been sadly out of harmony with the
scriptural injunction to "weep with them that weep."

There was a charm in the old cobbler's harangue, which I felt for long.
Even his views of life seemed to appear in these crude enthusiasms upon
general themes. There was a note of optimism which one could not fail
to catch, and to respect in a man who, for fifty years, had honestly
earned his living on a cobbler's bench. His sense of proprietorship
in his country, and of natural right to high personal pride in her
history, conveyed themselves to you as strong convictions, and you
understood something of the power which dwells in a people who feel
thus toward their country, and who share in her control.

An hour later I was at the Asylum on the errand of getting my pay. I
had anticipated the appointed time by a few minutes, and was the first
of the workmen in the office. The clerk was in his place, however; and
my appearance, hat in hand, furnished him with the signal for drawing
from his desk the receipt-forms, upon which the men acknowledge the
payments by their signatures. In the bustle of the business just
beginning, the clerk turned upon me and asked, somewhat brusquely, if
I could write my name, or whether he should write it for me, and I
affix my mark. So unexpected was the question, that I was conscious at
first of some bewilderment, and then of a rising resentment against the
fact that such a question should be put to an American workman. I said
that I had acquired the habit of signing my own name when necessary;
but I might have spared myself that folly, for the clerk hastened to
explain with the kindest consideration that, of all the laborers whom
he habitually pays off, scarcely half can write; "although," he added,
with an admirable touch of fairness, "a very small proportion of the
illiterate are native-born Americans." I am afraid that my resentment
had its source in a grotesquely foolish feeling. I have been mistaken
for a drunkard, and a detective, and a disreputable double of myself,
and have been made a bogey of to frighten children into obedience
withal, but not once, so far as I know, have I been taken for a
gentleman. And if the truth must be told, I fear that the very success
of my disguise is somewhat chagrinning at times.

There was no wrench on the next morning in parting with the family
with whom I boarded, unless my landlady shared my regret at leaving.
She was a meek little woman who slaved heroically at household work to
support her daughter, who studied stenography and typewriting, and her
idle husband, who led the life of a professional invalid. He had tried
upon me highly colored tales of his career as a soldier, and of what
he would have done in life but for his ill-health, tales which I soon
learned to interrupt with small services to his wife, and he gave me
up as hopelessly unsympathetic. A baseball game on the Asylum grounds
attracted a large crowd one afternoon; and as Hunt and I drove past on
an errand, I caught sight of the ex-soldier, who, at his home, was too
great a sufferer to contribute even a helping hand at the housework
toward his own support, but who here was dancing in vigor of delight
over a two-base hit.

It was clear that a rate of progress which had carried me not even so
far as the border line of Pennsylvania, during nearly two months, would
require a considerable portion of a lifetime in which to accomplish the
three thousand miles before me. I resolved upon more energetic tramping
as a wiser policy for, at least, the immediate future.

A rough plan was soon formed. I had saved nearly six dollars. It was
Wednesday morning. I would give three days to uninterrupted walk, and
by Friday evening I should reach Wilkesbarre. The whole of Saturday,
if so much time were needed, could then be given to a search for
employment; and the rest of Sunday would put me in trim to begin on
Monday morning the work which would provide in a few days for present
needs, and furnish a balance with which to begin the tramp once more.

At an early hour I was upon the high-road which leads to Port Jervis.
The day was a perfect type of the best season of our northern climate,
cloudless but for a fleecy embankment behind the purple hills to the
north, flooded with a glorious light touched with grateful warmth, and
which revealed with articulate distinctness every visible object in the
crystal-clear air--an air so pure and cool that it spurred you to your
quickest step, and sent bounding through you a glad delight in breath
and life.

In all the landscape was the richness of color and the vividness of
a transfigured world. An early frost had touched the foliage; the
leaves of the hickory-trees and elms were rustling crisply at their
tips, and the sumach deepened into a crimson that matched the color
of its clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples maintained the dark
luxuriance of their summer leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would
succumb only to the keener cold of the later autumn.

Up hill and down dale my road led me, where substantial farm-houses,
and enormous barns, and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle in
the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessaries and even the comforts
of life in rich abundance, and emphasized the wonder that from such
surroundings should come the recruits who ceaselessly throng our
crowded towns.

A few miles farther on the whole topography of the country changed.
I had passed through the village of Otisville and was walking in the
direction of Huguenot when my way carried me to a hillside from which I
could see the long stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward,
and lined on both sides, with almost artificial regularity, by ranges
of hills, which rose sharply from the plain below. Through a break at
the north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the plain-like valley,
disappears among the southern hills, while the valley itself, in almost
unbroken symmetry, reaches on to the west.

At the foot of the northern range, and on the eastern bank of the
river, is the town of Port Jervis. Its outer streets are the light,
airy thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced by small wooden
cottages, each with its plot of ground devoted in front to a few square
yards of turf, and carefully economized behind the house for the
purpose of supporting fruit-trees and providing a vegetable garden.

The great number of these individual homes, as indicating the manner of
life of multitudes of the working classes in provincial towns, seemed
to me to mark a conspicuous absence of crowded tenement living; and
on its positive side to indicate at least the possibility of wholesome
family life and of much home comfort. Certainly my experience at
Highland Falls and at Middletown confirms this impression. In each
of those cases the people with whom I stayed owned their home and
the plot of land about it, which contributed thriftily toward the
family support. The houses were ephemeral wooden cottages, done in the
degrading ugliness inspired by the Queen Anne revival, and furnished
in a taste even more florid, and they were not overclean. And yet they
were comfortable homes, in which we fared handsomely, eating meat three
times a day, and varieties of vegetables and admirable home-made bread,
and knew no stint of sugar or butter, and slept in good beds in not too
crowded rooms in an upper story.

All about me here, and reaching down the long vistas of communicating
streets, were the same external conditions, until I entered the closely
built up "brick blocks" of the business quarter of the town. I could
but think how characteristic of our smaller cities is this separate
individual home-life of the wage-earning classes, and how increasingly
are the improved means of transportation rendering like surroundings
possible for the workmen of the larger towns.

Having crossed the Delaware River, about four o'clock I began a walk
through a region no less beautiful than that through which I had
passed in the morning. My way lay in the valley, directly under the
steep hills that wall it in on the north. Their densely wooded sides
cast deep shadows obliquely across the road, and in this grateful
shade I walked on, listening to the songs of birds and the murmur of
mountain-streams, and the cooling sound of spray splashing from ledge
to ledge of moss-grown rocks.

At sunset I entered the village of Milford, which nestles securely
at the foot of the mountains of Pike County, a beautiful village of
wide, well-shaded streets, where there was little to mar the elegant
simplicity of dignified country homes, untouched by harrowing attempts
at the fantastic.

By eight o'clock I was fast asleep in a workmen's boarding-house, and
at sunrise on the next morning I was on the road which turns sharply
up the mountain-side. A dense mist lay upon the valley, but my way
soon led me up to the freer air, until, upon the summit of a ridge, I
reached the clear sunshine, and could see the emerging ranges of hills
to the east and south and the white mist resting motionless on the
valley below.

Up and up I climbed into higher altitudes. Each elevation appeared, as
I approached it, the topmost crest of the mountain, and yet I gained it
only to find another rough steep beyond.

There could scarcely have been a sharper contrast with the journey of
the previous day. The graceful undulations of rich farm-lands and the
broad plain of the Huguenot flats, checkered with field and forest and
pasture, and traversed by well-kept roads, and dotted over with the
buildings of prosperous farms and thriving villages, had given place,
in the panorama of my journey, to rugged mountains, steep and densely
wooded, except where, on some less hopeless site at the very margin of
cultivation, a settler had cleared the land and begun a conflict with
the stony soil in an almost desperate struggle for a living. Here were
mountain-roads that went from bad to worse, until, before I had crossed
the range, my way degenerated into a narrow, rocky trail, overgrown
with weeds, and along which I walked for a stretch of six or eight
miles without passing a dwelling.

That was in the afternoon. At a little before twelve o'clock I
had come to Shohola Falls. There, in a "hollow" on the bank of a
mountain-stream, stood a saw-mill, surrounded by piles of bleaching
boards and a few rough, unpainted cottages. Through the open door of
a shop I caught sight of an old carpenter bending over his bench. He
entered very readily into directions about the way and told me that I
had but to follow a direct road to Kimble, and from there there was no
difficulty in the way to Tafton, which, he said, was as far as I could
get that day. Then, with an eye on my pack, he asked pointedly what
I was peddling. The forgotten magazines recurred to me and I opened
my pack and handed him a copy. The frequent change of subject and the
variety of illustration fixed for a time his excited attention.

Half a score of young children now crowded about the door, and edged
cautiously into the shop, fixing upon me eyes wide open with the hunger
of curiosity. They were all barefooted and ragged, and not one of them
was clean, and at a single glance you saw that, mountain-bred and young
as they were, there was no wholesome color in their faces, and that the
very beauty of childhood was already fading before a persistent diet
from the frying-pan.

The old carpenter presently turned upon me with the air of one who was
master of the situation.

"Would you like to sell some of them books around here?" he asked.

I told him that I should.

"Well, you're a stranger here, ain't you?"

"Yes."

"Then don't you try it. A young fellow done this place out of more'n
fifty dollars last spring, and we're kind o' careful of strangers now."

I sat on the door-step to rest, and invited the children to look at the
pictures, which they did, hesitatingly at first, with timid advances,
in which curiosity struggled with their fear of the unfamiliar. But
they grew bolder as I invented stories to match the illustrations,
and presently they were all nestling about me in the ease of absorbed
attention. One little girl of four or five, who had eyed me at first
with an anxious look of alarm, now stood leaning over my shoulder
with an arm about my neck, and her soft brown hair, escaped from her
sun-bonnet, touching my face, while she looked down upon the pictures,
and I could feel her breath quickening as the story neared its climax.

I pressed on presently, and the children ran by my side, asking for yet
one story more, and finally calling their good-byes and waving their
hands to me as I disappeared around a curve in the road.

A few miles farther on I came to a lonely farm-house, where I knocked
in quest of a dinner. The open door revealed a woman's face, so sad
and worn, so full of care and of weary years of slavish drudgery,
that quite instinctively I began to apologize, and to conceal my real
purpose in aimless inquiry about the way.

"I do not know," she said; "but won't you come in? The boys will soon
be at home for dinner, and they can tell you."

Her voice was soft and sweet, and her manner so reassuring that I
gladly followed her into the sitting-room, where she introduced me to
her daughter, a slender, dark young woman, who sat sewing by an open
window.

I hastened to make myself known as a workman on my way to Wilkesbarre,
where I hoped to get employment, and I told them of my encounter with
the carpenter at the Falls. They smiled as though the flavor of his
humor was not lost to them, and they spoke of other characters at the
settlement quite as odd as he.

Both women were dressed in the plainest calico, and without a touch of
ornament, and the house was poor; poor to the verge of poverty; but
the walls were free from chromoes and worsted mottoes, and showed,
instead, a few good engravings, and the rag-carpet on the floor blent
in accordant colors, and curtains hung neatly at the windows.

Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother said that we would delay
it no longer for the boys. We sat down at a table in a rough shed which
opened from the sitting-room. A spotless cloth covered the board, and
the service was simple and tasteful, and there was the uncommon luxury
of napkins. The dinner moved with unembarrassed ease. We talked of the
surrounding country, and its resemblance to other regions, and of the
political situation. The mother led the talk, and tactfully guarded it
from any approach to silence or to topics too intimate. Once, however,
she touched lightly upon a former home in a prosperous corner of
another State, and instantly I felt the hint of some family tragedy.

And now her two sons came shuffling in, rough and ruddy from their
work, clean-cut, well-bred young fellows, far too young I thought to be
"hauling logs," and I could read an agony of anxiety in their mother's
face as she watched them wearily take their seat on the vacant bench by
the table. They had been left in the care of the work in the absence of
their father, who had gone some miles to a neighboring settlement, "on
business," their mother added, blushing deeply, while the boys looked
hard at their plates.

The afternoon's tramp lay through the wildest part of that wild
region. From Shohola Falls to Kimble the direct road is one which
leads straight across the mountain, and is almost unbroken, and seldom
used. In all its course I passed but two or three farms; and these
revealed a pitiful poverty, in the wretched hovels which did service
as farm-houses and barns, and, more plainly, if possible, in the
squalor of little children who gaped at me from among high weeds behind
tottering fences.

On I went for miles, over a road so lonely that it recalled the
loneliness of the sea, and, like the sea, the sweep of heaving
mountains seemed unbroken in a boundless monotony. And then the
landscape had in it the beauty and the majesty of the sea, and the
whispering of the wind over vast fields of stunted pines and scrub oaks
answered to the wash of waves, and bore a fragrance and freshness to
match with ocean breezes.

Late in the afternoon my way descended abruptly by a more frequented
road in the direction of Kimble. Presently I could see a railway and
a canal, and I felt a little, I fancied, as an explorer must upon
emerging, once more, into the region of the explored.

I wished to know the distance and the way to Tafton, and so I inquired
of the first person whom I met. She was a milkmaid, and so picturesque
a figure, that I felt a pleasurable excitement in the chance of a
word with her. Her calico skirt was tucked up a little at one side.
Under one bare arm she carried a milking-stool, and a bucket in the
other hand. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her head, and hung like a
scholar's hood on her back. The sunlight was playing in glory about her
face and in her abundant auburn hair.

My excitement suddenly took another form; for, as I lifted my hat in
apologetic inquiry, there fell about me a shower of oak-leaves, which I
had placed in the crown for the sake of added coolness.

The milkmaid had met me with a clear, frank look between the eyes;
but she shrank a little now, and could not resist a startled glance,
full of questioning, as to what further my hat might contain, and she
answered me more with the purpose, I fancy, of being quickly rid of a
wanderer of such doubtful mind, than of adding to his information.

The walk from Kimble to Tafton, I presently found, could be shortened
by taking a path through the forest; and I was soon panting up the
hillside, grateful for the long twilight which promised to see me
safe, before the darkness, to my destination.

On the way I fell in with a young quarryman, whose home was near
Tafton, and who willingly became my guide. He was only sixteen, but
already he had worked for four years at his trade. His gaunt, angular
body showed plainly the marks of arrested development, when the growth
of the boy had hardened prematurely into an almost deformed figure of a
confirmed laborer.

He lunged clumsily beside me, and was inclined to be taciturn at first;
but he warmed presently to readier speech, and talked frankly of his
work and manner of life. At twelve he had been taken from school and
sent to the quarry to help his father support a growing family. And
then his days had settled into a ceaseless round of hard work, from
which there was no escape for him until he should be twenty-one, an age
which appeared to his perception at an almost infinite distance.

His attitude to his present circumstances was not a resentful one.
He seemed to think it most natural that he should help in the family
support; or, rather, no other possibility seemed to occur to him. It
was soon apparent, too, that his chiefest hope and ambition, with
reference to his ultimate freedom from that necessity, were centred
in a possible return to school advantages. He spoke of his efforts to
study after work hours, and of the hardness of such a course, and owned
to the fear of insurmountable difficulties in the future. His reticence
was gone now, and he was speaking with hearty freedom, and with his
eyes all alight with the dream of his life. I told him something of
the increased opportunities of education for men who must make their
own way, and of how many men I had known who had supported themselves
through college.

We parted at the edge of the forest, where we reached his home, a frail
shell of a shanty, standing upon stumps of felled trees, and he was
welcomed by the sight of his mother, chopping wood at the roadside, and
a troop of ragged children playing about the open door.

At nightfall, on the next evening, I entered Wilkesbarre, but I got so
far only by virtue of a long lift in a farmer's cart, which carried me,
by a stroke of great good fortune, over much the longest part of the
day's journey.

So far my plan had been carried out. It was Friday evening, and I was
safe in Wilkesbarre, somewhat worn by the walk of rather over eighty
miles, and with an increased dislike for my burdensome pack, but with
every prospect of being fit for work so soon as I should find it. My
success in that direction had been so uniform, that instead of sleeping
in the open, as I had done on the night before, I allowed myself the
luxury of a bed in a cheap boarding-house, and a supper and a breakfast
at its table, before beginning my search. Further good fortune awaited
me, for Saturday morning lent itself with cheerful brightness to the
enterprise. At an early hour I stepped out into a busy street of the
city, sore and stiff with walking, but high of hope, and not without a
certain elevation of spirit, which might have warned me of a fall.

Work on the city sewers was being carried through the public square.
I found the contractor, and applied for work as a digger. Very
courteously he took the pains to explain to me that he was obliged to
keep on hand, and pay for full time, a force of men far larger than was
demanded, except by certain exigencies, and that he could not increase
their number. Not far from the square another gang of workmen were
laying the curbstones and repairing the street, but here I was again
refused. I lifted my eyes to the site of a stone building that was
nearing completion, and there, too, no added hands were needed.

By this time I had neared the post-office, and I found letters awaiting
me there which claimed the next half hour. But even more embarrassing,
as a check to further search, was a free reading-room, which now
invited me to files of New York newspapers, in which I knew that I
should find details of recent interesting political developments at
Rochester and Saratoga, not to mention possible fresh complications in
the more exciting game of politics abroad. I went in, and like Charles
Kingsley's young monk, Philemon, who, wandering one day farther than
ever before from the monastery in the desert, chanced upon the ruins
of an old Egyptian temple; and mindful of a warning against such
seduction, yet guiltily charmed by the rare beauty of the frescoes,
prayed aloud, "Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity,"
but looked, nevertheless--I looked, too, and I read on until mounting
remorse robbed the reading of all pleasure and drove me to my task
again.

But I had fallen once; and, by a sad fatality, scarcely had I renewed
the search, with weakened power of resistance, when I stumbled upon a
fiercer temptation in the form of a library, which announced in plain
letters its freedom to the public until the hour of nine in the evening.

Forgetful of my character as a workman; miserably callous to the
claim of duty to find employment, if possible; and in any case, to
live honestly the life which I had assumed, I entered the wide-open,
hospitable doors, and was soon lost to other thought, and even to the
sense of shame, in the absorbing interest of favorite books.

In the lonely tramp across the mountains of Pike County I walked
sometimes for miles with no opportunity of quenching a growing thirst,
when suddenly I came upon a mountain-spring that trickled from the
solid rock, and formed a little pool in its shade, where I threw myself
on the ground, and, with a glorious sense of relief, drank deeply of
its cold water. The analogy is a weak one, for the physical relief and
the momentary pleasure but faintly suggest the prolonged intellectual
delight, after two months of unslackened thirst.

Here was an inexhaustible supply, and there were polite librarians who
responded cheerfully to your slightest wish; and, best of all, there
was an inner door which disclosed a reading-room, where perfect quiet
reigned, and comfortable chairs invited you to grateful ease, and
shelves on shelves of books were free to your eager hand.

To pass from one writer to another, among the volumes that lay on the
table, lingering over long-loved passages, or dipping lightly here and
there, absorbing pleasure from the very touch of the book and the sight
of the well-printed page, held by the charm of some characteristic
phrase, and finally to sink into the folds of an easy-chair with
a store of books within ready reach--what delight can equal such
satisfaction of a craving sense?

There through the livelong day I sit, and through the early evening,
until I am roused by the sound of slamming shutters which is the
janitor's signal for nine o'clock, the hour of closing for the night.

Taking my hat and stick I walk out into the gas-lit street, and into
our modern world, with its artificialities and its social and labor
problems; and I remember that I am a proletaire out of a job, and that
with shameless neglect of duty I have been idling through priceless
hours. Crestfallen, I hurry to my boarding-house, longing, like any
conscious-stricken inebriate, to lose remorse in sleep.

As I walk to my lodgings a certain fellow-feeling warms me with fresh
sympathy for my kind. I have met with my first reverse, not a serious
one, but still the search for work for the first time in my experience
has been fruitless through most of a morning. Instead of persevering
industriously, I yield weakly to the desire to forget my present lot,
and the duty it entails, in the intoxication that beckons to me from
free books. That happens to be my temptation, and I fall.

Another workman of my class, in precisely my position, encounters, not
one chance temptation which he might escape by taking another street,
but at every corner open doors which invite him to the companionship of
other men, who will help him to forget his discouragements so long as
his savings last. And as we are both turned into the street at night,
in What do we differ as regards our moral strength? He yielded to his
temptation, and I to mine.




CHAPTER V

A FARM HAND


WILLIAMSPORT, LYCOMING COUNTY, PA.,
Saturday, 3 October, 1891.

From Wilkesbarre it was an easy day's march to the village of Pleasant
Hill, which lies in the way to Williamsport. The only notable incident
of the tramp was one which confirmed me in an early formed policy. I
have avoided railways, and have walked in preference along the country
roads, as affording better opportunities of intercourse with people.
But in going on that morning from Wilkesbarre to the ferry which
crossed the river to Plymouth, I took the advice of a gate-keeper at
a railway crossing and started down the track on a long trestle as a
short cut to the ferry. All went well until I was half way over, and
then two coal trains passed simultaneously in opposite directions, and
I hung by my hands from the framework at one side, while the engineer
and fireman on the locomotive nearest me laughed heartily at the figure
that I cut, with the side of each car grazing my pack, and my hold on
the railing growing visibly slacker.

It was a little after nightfall when I reached the tavern at Pleasant
Hill. Of my wages I had fifty cents left. I questioned the proprietor
as to the demand for work in his community. He was quite encouraging.
Only that afternoon, he said, one of the best farmers of the
neighborhood had been inquiring in the village for a possible man, and
to the best of his knowledge he had not found one. I said that I should
apply at his farm in the morning, and then I broached the subject of
entertainment. We soon struck a bargain for a supper and breakfast, and
the privilege of a bed on the hay; but when, after supper, I asked to
be directed to the barn, the landlord silently led the way to a little
room upstairs, and there wished me good-night.

In the early morning he pointed out to me the road to his neighbor's
farm, which I followed with ready success. I was penniless now, and
had only an uncertain chance of work. And then, if the farmer should
ask me, I should be obliged to own to inexperience, and the demand
for farm-hands I thought must be limited, at a date so far into the
autumn. But the morning was exquisite, and the buoyancy that it bred
was an easy match for misgivings, so that it was with a light heart
that I turned from the road into a lane which leads to the house of the
farmer, whom I shall call Mr. Hill.

All about me were the marks of thrift. The fences stood straight and
stout, with an air of lasting security. On a rising ledge above the
lane was the farm-house, a small, unpainted wooden cottage, bleached to
the rich, deep brown of a well-colored meerschaum pipe, and as snug and
tight as a pilot's schooner. Near it was a summer-kitchen that seemed
fairly to glow with conscious pride in its cleanness, and the very
foot-path from the gate to the cottage-door was swept like a threshing
floor.

On the door-step sat a girl in a calico dress of delicate pink, with a
dark gingham apron concealing all its front. She was shelling peas into
a milk-pan which rested on her lap, and the morning sunlight was in her
flaxen hair, and showed you the delicate freshness of a pink-and-white
complexion. Sober hazel eyes were fixed on me as I walked up the
foot-path, and of us two I was the embarrassed one. I have not got over
a certain timidity in asking for work, and each request is a sturdy
effort of the will, with the rest of me in cowardly revolt, and a timid
shrinking much in evidence I fear.

"Is this Mr. Hill's farm?" I ask, and I know that I am blushing deeply.

"Yes," says the young woman, with grave dignity and the most natural
self-possession in the world.

"Is he at home?" I am sweating freely now, as I stand with my hat
crushed between my hands, and the pack feeling like a mountain on my
back.

"He is down at the pond on the edge of the farm." And her serious eyes
follow the line of the long lane which sinks from the house with the
downward slope of the land.

With her permission I leave the pack behind, and then follow the
indicated way. The barn is on my right, a large, unpainted structure,
stained by weather to as dark a hue as the house, but there are no
loose boards about it, nor any rifts among the shingles, and the
doors hang true on their hinges, and meet in well-adjusted touch. The
cowyard and the pigsty flank the lane, and the neatness of the yard
and the tightness of the troughs make clear that there is no waste of
fodder there. Farther down and on my left is the wagon-house, as good
a building almost as the cottage, and with much the same clean, strong
compactness. There are no ploughs nor other farming tools lying exposed
to the weather, no signs of idle capital wasting with the wear of
rust, but everywhere the active, thrifty strength of wise economy.

Two men are at work at the pond, and I pick my man at once. They are
plainly brothers, but the Mr. Hill of whom I am in search is the
stronger-looking man, and is clearly in command of the job. I am
reminded of a certain type which one comes to know on "the street,"
a clean-cut, vigorous man, who keeps his youth till sixty, and who,
for many years, has had a masterful, compelling hand upon the conduct
of affairs, has put railways through the West, and opened up mining
regions, and knows the inner workings of legislatures and of much else
besides.

I wait for a pause in the work, and try to screw my courage to the
sticking-point; and then I tell Mr. Hill that the landlord at the
tavern has sent me to him in the belief that he needs a man, and I add
that I shall be glad of a job. Without preliminary questions Mr. Hill
engages me on the spot, and makes me an offer of board and lodging,
and seventy-five cents a day, which, he says, is the usual rate on
the farms at that season. I close with the bargain, and ask to be set
to work immediately. A minute later I am walking up the lane with a
message for Mrs. Hill, to the effect that I am the new "hired man," and
that she will please give me, to take to the pond, a certain "broad
hoe" from the wagon-house.

Mrs. Hill understands the situation at once; she makes no comment, but
goes with me to the wagon-house, where she points out the hoe among
other tools in a corner. She has said nothing so far, and I feel a
little uncomfortable, but now she turns to me with a frank directness
of manner that is very reassuring.

"I ain't got no room for you in the house, but I guess you'll be
comfortable sleeping out here. You can fetch your grip, and I'll show
you your bed."

Pack in hand, I follow her up the steps to the loft of the wagon-house,
and she points to a cot near the farther window and a wooden chair
beside it. "Some time to-day I'll make up your bed, and if there's
anything you want you can tell me." This is her final word as she
leaves me to return to the house. I slip on my overalls and take note
of my new quarters. Windows at both ends of the loft provide ample
ventilation. The cot is covered with a corn-husk mattress, as clean
and fresh as a cock of new hay. The very floor is free from dust.
The rafters hang thick with bunches of seed-corn on the cob, with
their outer husks removed and the inner husks drawn back and neatly
interwoven, the whole effect suggesting stalactites in a cave. The air
is fragrant with the perfume from slices of apples, that are closely
threaded and hung up to dry in graceful festoons from rafter to rafter.

Five minutes later I am at work at the pond. The pond is an artificial
one, created by a wooden dam. The water has been allowed to flow out,
and the old woodwork is to be renewed.

My immediate task is to dig a ditch along the outer side of the rotting
planks, so that they can be removed and replaced by new ones. I am
soon alone on the job, for the farmers' work calls them elsewhere.
The experience in the sewer-ditch at Middletown is all to my credit,
and my spirits rise with the discovery that I can handle my pick and
shovel more effectively, and with less sense of exhaustion. And then
the stint is my own, and no boss stands guard over me as a dishonest
workman. At least I am conscious of none, and I am working on merrily,
when suddenly I become aware of my employer bending over the ditch and
watching me intently.

It is a face very red with the heat and much bespattered with mud,
into which my tools sink gurglingly, that I turn up to him.

"How are you getting on?"

"Pretty well, thank you."

"You mustn't work too hard. All that I ask of a man is to work steady.
Have an apple?"

He is gone in a moment, and I stand in the ditch eating the apple with
immense relish, and thinking what a good sort that farmer is, and how
thoroughly he understands the principle of getting his best work out
of a man! He has appealed to my sense of honor by intrusting the job
to me, and now he has won me completely to his interests by showing
concern in mine.

The work is hard, and the morning hours are very long, but the
labor achieves its own satisfaction as the task grows under one's
self-directed effort, and there is no torture of body and soul in the
surveillance of a slave-driving boss.

But I am thoroughly tired and very hungry when Mr. Hill calls to me
from across the pond that it is time to go to dinner. I join him in
haste, and we walk up the lane together, while he drives his team
before him, and points out with evident pride the young colts and other
stock in the pasture.

On a bench near the door of the summer-kitchen are two tin basins
full of water, and there we wash ourselves, drawing by means of a
gourd-dipper from a brimming bucket near by any fresh supply of water
that we want. A coarse, clean towel hangs over a roller above the
bench, and at this we take our turns.

The dinner is a quiet meal, and tends to solemnity. Mrs. Hill and her
daughter sit opposite the farmer and me. Little is said, but for me
there is absorbing interest in the meal itself. It is worthy of the
best traditions of country life, clean in all its appointments to a
degree of spotlessness, really elegant in its quiet simplicity, and
appetizing?--how was I ever to stop eating those potatoes that spread
under the pressure of my fork into a mass of flaky deliciousness, or
the ears of sweet-corn fresh from a late field, or the green peas that
swim in a sweet stew of their own brewing, or, best of all, the little
pond pickerel that are grilled to a crisp brown turn?

In our more artificial forms of living we habitually eat when we are
not hungry, and drink when we are not thirsty, and we know little of
the sheer physical delight in meat and drink when our natures seize
joyously upon the means of life, and organs work in glad adaptation
to function, and the organism, in full revival, responds to its
environment!

The work moves uninterruptedly in the afternoon; and at six o'clock,
as I wearily drag my feet along the lane by the farmer's side, I can
see his daughter driving the cattle through the pasture to the cowyard,
and I wonder how I shall fare at the evening milking. But I am not
put to that test; for the farmer declines my offer of help, with the
explanation that, under our arrangement, my day's work is done at six
o'clock, and that he is not entitled to further help, nor does he need
it, he adds, for his wife and daughter always lend a hand at the chores.

Supper is almost a repetition of dinner, with a pitcher of rich milk
kindly pressed upon me when I decline the tea, and with apple-sauce and
cake in the place of pumpkin-pie. Soon after, I am lighting my way with
a lantern through the dark to my cot in the loft, and for ten hours
I sleep the sleep of a child, and awake at six in the morning to the
farmer's call of "John, hey John!" from under the window.

All of that day, which was Wednesday, was given to completing the work
on the dam. The necessary excavation was soon finished, and then we
laid the timbers, and nailed the new planks into place, and filled in
and packed the earth behind them. Over the completed job the farmer
expressed such a depth of satisfaction that I felt a glow of pride
in the work, and a sense of proprietorship, which was splendidly
compensating for the effort which it had cost.

The remaining three days of the week we spent in picking apples.
Behind the wagon-house was an orchard. Mr. Hill first selected a tree,
and then we placed under it the number of empty barrels, which, in
his judgment, corresponded to its yield, a judgment which was always
singularly accurate. Then, each supplied with a half-bushel basket
with a wooden hook attached to the handle, we next climbed among the
branches, and suspending our baskets, we carefully picked the apples
with a quick upward turn of the fruit, which detached them at the point
at which the stem was fast to the twig. Both baskets were usually full
at about the same moment, and then we took turns in climbing down and
receiving the baskets from the tree, and emptying the apples into the
barrels with great caution against possible bruising.

All this was Arcadian in its joyous simplicity. All day we moved among
the boughs, breathing the fragrance of ripened fruit and the mellow
odor of apple-trees turning at the touch of frost; picking ceaselessly
the full-juiced apples "sweetened with the summer light," while above
us white clouds fled briskly before the northwest wind across the
clear blue of the autumn sky; and below us lay the pasture, where the
patient cattle grazed, and beyond stretched open country of field and
forest, which, in that crystal air, met the horizon in a clean, sharp
line.

Mr. Hill and I were growing very chummy. A faint uncomfortable distrust
of me, which I suspected through the first two days, had wholly
disappeared. We talked with perfect freedom now and with a growing
liking for each other, which, for me, added vastly to the charm of
those six days on the farm.

I tried at first to lead the talk, and to draw Mr. Hill into
expressions of his views of life, that I might learn his attitude
toward modern progress, and catch glimpses of the growth of things from
his point of view. But Mr. Hill was proof against such promptings. He
was a shrewd, practical farmer, with a masterful hold upon all the
details of his enterprise, and with a mind quickened by thrifty conduct
of his own affairs to a catholic taste for information. His schooling
had been limited, he said, but he must have meant his actual school
training; for life itself had been his school, and admirably had he
improved its advantages. He was a trained observer and a close student
of actual events. Instead of my getting him to talk, he made me talk,
but with so natural a force as to rob it of all thought of compulsion.

The talk drifted early into politics, and I soon found that my
light-hearted generalizations would not pass muster. Back and back he
would press me upon the data of each induction, until I was forced to
tell what I knew, or was confronted with my ignorance.

And then he delighted in talk of other people than our own, and his
knowledge of a somewhat general contemporaneous history was curiously
varied and accurate. Stories of succeeding English ministries, and
even of the short-lived French cabinets, were ready to his use, and
he tactfully righted me in my errors. But he held me closest to my
memories of things among the common people, the agricultural laborers
in England, and their relation to the farmers, and theirs in turn to
the landed proprietors, and the promise which the land could give of
continued support to three classes, under the changed conditions of
modern life. All that I could remember of a typical laborer's home,
and of its manner of life, and of the general aspect of an English
farm, seemed only to whet his appetite, and to strengthen his demand
for what I knew of the continental peasantry. His interest centred
strongly in the French, and there was plainly a peculiar charm for
him in every detail which I could give of the French farmers, with
their small holdings, and their inherited habits of thrift, and of the
close culture of their lands. But he would even lead me on to speak
of great cities, and of the life in them of the rich and poor, and of
any signs, of which I knew, of growing social discontent. And with an
interest that never flagged, he questioned me on works of art; and
followed patiently, and with a zest that warmed one's own enthusiasm,
through endless churches, and long dim galleries, and by narrow,
crooked streets of a modern city to the ruins of its distant past. And
there we restored the crumbling piles, until there stood clear to his
imagination a vision of Imperial Rome, and his eyes kindled to some
great general's triumph moving through the _Via Sacra_, and the people
swarming to the very chimney-tops, their infants in their arms, and on
the air the deep, rich moving roar of high acclaim!

Sunday was the last day of my stay on the farm. When, in the middle
of the week, I found that Mr. Hill was likely to keep me, I was
conscience-stricken, because I had not told him that my stay would
be short. He said nothing at first in reply to my announcement, but
presently remarked that it was very hard to get men in that part of the
country.

"But, surely," I said, "more men apply to you for work than you can
possibly employ."

He looked at me with some wonder, at my ignorance.

"For a long time I have been looking for a man to help me," he said.
"I'm growing old, and I can't do the work that I once did. If I could
find the right man, I'd keep him the year round, and pay him good
wages. But the best young fellows go to the cities, and the rest are
mostly a worthless lot. There's hardly a day in the year when I haven't
a job for any decent man who'll ask for it. I have to go looking for
men, and then I generally can't find one that's any account."

This was much the longest speech that he had made to me so far, and a
very interesting one I thought it, and I am only sorry that I cannot
reproduce the exact phraseology, with its Anglo-Saxon words set, by an
instinctive choice, into rugged sentences which admirably expressed the
man. I waited hopefully for further speech from him, and at last it
came, quite of its own accord; for I had given up trying to draw him
out.

We were sitting together on Sunday evening on the platform of the
pump in front of the farm-house. It had been a very restful Sunday. In
the morning I went to the village church, where two services followed
each other in quick succession. The first was a prayer-meeting,
attended by a little company of farming people and village folk, who
conscientiously parted company at the door on the basis of sex, and sat
on opposite sides of a central aisle.

The service was a simple one. The leader read a passage from the
Bible, and offered prayer, and then gave out a hymn. When the singing
ceased, one after another, the older men, with nervous pauses between,
rose to "testify" or sank to their knees, and prayed aloud. I chiefly
remember one as a typical figure--an old man, whose thick white hair
mingled with a bushy beard that covered his face. I noticed him first
in comfortable possession of a bench along which he stretched his legs.
On his feet were loose carpet-slippers; and with his shoulders braced
against the wall, and his head thrown back, and his eyes closed, he
looked the vision of physical ease, which matched the expression of
deep contentment that he wore. There was no suspicion of sleep about
him. Most evidently he followed with liveliest sympathy every word that
was said or sung. I looked up presently at the sound of a new voice,
and found the old man on his feet. He was adding his "testimony" to
what had gone before, and was speaking rapidly in a deep, gruff voice
with blunt articulation. There was a strong reminder in the performance
of a school-boy's "speaking his piece;" the monotonous, unnatural tone;
the rapid flow of conventional, committed phrase; and the nervous
tension, which communicated itself to his hearers in a fear that he
might forget.

But there came at length, without calamity, the final "Pray for me
that I may be kept faithful," and then he knelt in prayer. Invocations
from the Prophets, and supplications from the Psalms, and glowing
exhortations from the Epistles, were interwoven with strangest
interpolations of his own, while his voice rose and fell in regular
cadences and he audibly caught his breath between. But he was losing
himself in his devotion, and presently his voice fell to a natural
tone, and his words grew plain and direct, as he held converse with
the Almighty about our common life--of sin and its awful guilt, of
temptation and its fateful trial, of suffering and its terrible
reality, of sorrow and its cruel mystery. Then, as though quickened
by the touch of truth, his faith rose on surer wings, and his prayer
breathed the sense of sin forgiven, and of life made strong by a power
not our own, and of hope exultant in the knowledge "of that new life
when sin shall be no more!"

A solemn stillness held us when he rose, and made us feel the presence
in our common lot of things divine and that deep sacredness of life
which awes us most.

A short preaching service followed. The preacher drove up on the hour
from another parish, and started off, at the meeting's end, for yet a
third appointment.

This is a long digression from Mr. Hill's talk of the evening, and
I have said nothing yet of the afternoon. We took chairs out on the
grass in front of the cottage, after dinner, and sat in the shade.
We soon had visitors. Mr. Hill's brother and his wife walked up from
the lower farm, and a little later there came Mr. Hill's son and his
young bride. The son is a physician, whose practice covers much of
that country-side; and it was interesting to me to learn that his
professional training was got at the College of Physicians and Surgeons
in New York.

Fearful of disturbing the family gathering, I drew off a little, and
gave my attention to a book. Late in the afternoon I was roused by
the coming of another guest. He was an old neighboring farmer out
in search of a heifer which had broken through the pasture-fence. As
he joined us he was speaking so swiftly and incoherently about the
heifer's escape that I felt some doubt of his sanity, but he quieted
down in a moment, and threw himself on the grass with the evident
purpose of resting before resuming the search. He was lying flat upon
his back, and his long bony fingers were clasped under his head. He
wore no hat, nor coat, nor waistcoat, and a dark gingham shirt lay
close to the sharp outlines of his almost fleshless body. Braces that
were patched with strings passed over his lean shoulders, and were
made fast to faded blue jeans, whose extremities were tucked into an
old pair of cowhide boots. A long white beard rested on his breast,
reaching almost to his waist. Only a thin fringe of hair remained above
his ears; and over the skull the bare skin was so tightly drawn that
you could almost trace the zigzagging junctures of the frontal and the
cranium bones.

But skeleton as he was, he was marvellously alive. His eyes were
aflame, and prone as he lay and resting, he impressed you as a man so
vitalized, that with a single movement he could be upon his feet and
in intense activity. He was talking on about the heifer, nervously
repeating to us, again and again, the details of where he had seen her
last, and the rift which he had found in the fence, and how he had sent
his hired man in one direction, and had gone in another himself.

He was a rich farmer, Mr. Hill told me afterward, and he lived alone,
except for an occasional hired man whom he could induce to stay with
him for a season. But even in his old age he worked on his farm
with the strength and endurance of three men, laying aside, year by
year, his store of gain. Without a single human tie he worked on as
though spurred by every claim of affection and the highest sense of
responsibility to provide for those whom he loved; and all the while a
vast misanthropy grew upon him, and he would see less and less of his
fellow-men, and an almost life-long scepticism hardened into downright
unbelief.

So far he had not noticed me; but now he turned my way, lifting himself
upon his elbow, and fixing his sunken, burning eyes on mine, while the
white hairs of his beard mingled with the blades of grass.

"You're hired out to Jim, ain't ye?"

Jim was his designation of Mr. Hill.

"Yes," I said.

"What's he payin' you?"

I told him.

Mr. Hill was squirming in nervous discomfort.

"What's your name?"

I gave it him.

"Where are you come from?"

"Connecticut."

"Connecticut? That's down South, ain't it?"

"No, that's down East."

"Was you raised there?"

I do not know into what particulars of my history and of my antecedents
this process might have forced me had not the heifer come to my relief.
She was a beautiful creature, with a clean sorrel coat, and wide,
liquid, mischievous eyes; and as she ran daintily over the turf at
the side of the lane, saucily tossing her head, you knew that she was
closely calculating every chance of dodging the gawky country boy who,
breathing hard, lunged after her.

Without a word of parting, and as abruptly as he came, the old man was
gone to head her off in the right direction at the mouth of the lane.
And so he disappeared, as strange a human being as the world holds,
living tremendously a life of strenuous endeavor, yet Godless and
hopeless and loveless in it all, except for the greedy love of gain,
which holds him in miserable bondage, as he works his life away.

It was soon after supper that Mr. Hill and I sat down together on the
platform of the pump. There was little movement in the air, and it was
very mild for the twenty-seventh of September. As the stars appeared,
they shone upon us through a mellow warmth, like that of summer, in
which they seem magically near, and one feels their calm companionship
in human things.

"And you've made up your mind to go in the morning?" Mr. Hill began.

"Yes," I said, "I must be off. I am truly sorry to go. But you surprise
me by what you tell me of the difficulty in the country of getting men
to work. One hears so much about 'the unemployed,' that any demand for
labor, which remains unsupplied, seems to me an anomalous condition."[A]

"That's a big question," he said, with a deep sigh, as he leant back
against the pump and looked at me out of blue eyes that were gray and
keen in the starlight. "It reminds me of what we used to call a hard
example in arithmetic in the district school when I was a boy. There's
a good many things you've got to take account of, if you work it out
right, and there's a good many chances of mistake, and a mistake goes
hard with your answer. I haven't worked this sum and I haven't seen it
worked, but I've studied it a good while, and I think I know how to do
parts of it."

He paused for a moment and then went on: "In the last hundred and
fifty years there have been great changes in the world in the ways of
producing things--'improved methods of production' the books call it.
Some say it ain't really 'improved,' only faster and cheaper, but I'm
not arguing that point. The power of people to produce the necessaries
of life is a big sight greater than it was a hundred and fifty years
ago--that's my point. It's what the books call 'increased power of
production.' And among civilized people there's been this increase of
producing power in about all the forms of production. In some forms
it's been very great, and in others not so great; but I guess there
ain't many kinds of business that haven't been changed by it.

"Now, I think that the farming business has lagged behind the
rest. Not that there ain't been improvement, for there's been
great improvement. There's the steam-ploughs, and the reapers, and
harvesters, and mowers, and the threshing-machines; and then there's
the science of agricultural chemistry. But I'm judging of what I know
of the farming business as it's carried on.

"Now, here's my farm: it's part of a tract that my great-grandfather
settled on and cleared. I've heard my grandfather tell many a time of
the Indians that were all about here when he was a boy, and even my
father often went hunting deer down on the lake this side of the woods.

"Well, I know this country pretty well, and I find that a farmer now
don't work any bigger farm than my grandfather did, nor the work isn't
much lighter, nor he doesn't get much more for it. There's been a
good many changes, but as the farming business goes, there ain't any
increased production that's kept up with other kinds of business when
you calculate how many farmers there are and how much they do.

"I read in a book the other day that twenty-five men, with modern
machinery, can produce as much cotton cloth as the whole population
of Lancashire could produce in the old way; but there ain't any
twenty-five men who could work the farms of this township with all the
modern farming machinery.

"Take it day in and day out the whole year round on the farms, and a
man's work or a team's work is pretty much what it was a hundred years
ago.

"And here's another thing that makes a great difference between
farming and other kinds of business. When I go to the city I most
generally visit some factory and go through it as carefully as I can.
The machinery is interesting and wonderful, and if it's something
useful they're making, I like to compare the productive power of the
factory hands with what it would be if they were all working separately
by the old methods. But besides this, there's the wonderful economy
that I see. The factory is built so as to save all the carting that's
possible, and there's men always studying how they can make it more
convenient, and can improve the machinery and cut down the costs.
And then I don't find any leakage anywhere that can be helped; and
it's most wonderful what they do in some kinds of manufacturing
with what you'd think was the very refuse, working it up into some
by-product that makes the difference between profit and loss in the
whole business. It's close culture of the closest kind applied to
manufacture.

"Sometimes I've had a chance to talk to a superintendent of a factory,
and he's told me about the business from the inside--how carefully
he must study the market and how closely he must calculate a hundred
things; and how exactly his books must be kept, and how easy it is for
a little thing that's been miscalculated or overlooked to ruin the
business.

"I tell you that I've come to see pretty clearly that the business
that pays in these times of competition is a powerful lucky one and
powerful well managed. When the year's work is done and the wages have
been paid, and the rent and the interest on the capital paid up, and
the salaries paid to the brains that run the thing, it's a remarkable
business that's got anything over in the way of profit.

"Now, the farming business, as I look at it, is a long way behind all
that. We don't know much about close culture in farming in America, and
I don't believe there's one farmer in five hundred that keeps books
and can tell you exactly where he stands; and these things we've got
to learn. It's terrible easy to let things go their own way pretty
much--until the fences are falling down and your buildings are out of
repair, and your tools are going to ruin with rust, and your children
are not having good advantages. You may think that you're too poor to
afford anything different and that it's economy to live so. But it
ain't; it's the worst kind of waste. It takes a sight of hard work,
brainwork, and handwork, too, to get good, substantial buildings and
fences, and tools and stock, and to keep them good and to raise your
children well. You've got to make a close calculation on every penny,
but it's the only true economy. The difference between the economy of
shabbiness and the economy of thrift is the difference between waste
and saving.

"My father could not give me much school learning, but he learnt me to
farm it thoroughly. I've been at it a good many years now, and I know
by experience the truth of what he taught me. If there's ever been
anything more than our living at the end of the year, it's only because
we all worked hard, my wife and daughter as hard in the house as me
and my son on the farm; and because we studied to raise the best of
everything we could, and to get the best prices we could, and we saved
every penny that could be saved.

"My son wanted to study to be a doctor when he was growing up, and so
I gave him the best schooling that he could get around here; and when
he was old enough, and I saw his mind was made up, I sent him to the
best medical college I could find. And I've given my daughter all the
schooling she's had the strength for. It's the best economy to get the
best, whether it's buildings, or tools, or stock, or education; and
there's a great deal more satisfaction in it besides. I tell you this
because it's my experience, and I know it, but I owe it mainly to the
raising my father gave me. It's hard work, and it's hard study, and
it's awful careful economy in little things as well as big, that makes
a man succeed in any business.

"You've heard the saying that 'the luxuries of one generation are the
necessities of the next.' That's certainly true in the country. I've
heard my grandfather say that when he was a boy it didn't take more
than ten dollars a year to pay for everything that the family bought.
All that they wore and ate and drank they raised on the farm, and they
built their own buildings, and made their own tools, mostly, and worked
out most of their taxes.

"I'm not saying that farmers must go back to that. It ain't possible.
It's every way better now to buy your cloth than to make it, and so
with your tools, and many other things; but when I see a farmer's
family spend in a year for clothes and feathers and finery as much as
ten families did for all they bought in the old days, and at the same
time their fences are falling and their stock suffering from neglect,
I see that these people don't know their business. And when I see a
farmer mortgage a piece of land to give his daughter a fashionable
wedding, and then complain that there ain't a living to be made any
more in farming, I'm sorry for him.

"You see, in the old days the ways of farming were primitive and
simple, and the ways of living were primitive and simple, too, and they
matched each other. Now both have changed. Farming is different, and
living in the country is different. The style of living in the country
is copied from the towns, where there's been the greatest increase of
producing power; and I argue that the increase of producing power on
the farms hasn't by any means kept up to what it is in the cities.

"Now, this difference ain't unnatural. Everybody knows that the big
fortunes of the last hundred years have mostly been made in manufacture
in the cities, and in the increase of land values in the cities, and
in the development of railroads and mines. And where the big fortunes
have been made, there's been the best chances for brains and energy
and enterprise. And where brains and energy and enterprise are at work,
there all kinds of labor will go, for it's these that make employment
for labor.

"Now, it ain't saying anything against farmers to say that the best
brains that have been born on the farms for the last hundred years
haven't stayed on the farms. The farming business hasn't had the
benefit of them, but they've gone to the professions, and the business
in the cities, where the most money was to be made.

"So that through all this time of 'increasing power of production'
there's been a constant drain from the country of its best brains and
blood, and it ain't strange that the farming business has lagged behind
the others which these have gone into.

"I believe there's going to be a change. I believe the change is begun.
Competition is so keen now in about all kinds of business, that the
chances of making a fortune and making it quick are very few. There's
about so much interest to be got for your capital, and if the security
is good, the interest is very low, and there's about so much to be
got for your brains, unless you've got particular rare brains; and as
the competition grows keener, brains begin to see that there's about
as much to be made out of farming as out of other kinds of business.
Invention has done a lot already, and when the same economy and thrift
and thorough business principles are used in farming as are used in
other kinds of production, the farming business will soon catch up
with the others. And where the brains and enterprise and energy go,
labor will soon follow; and for a time anyway, there won't be as many
unemployed in the cities, nor as many farmers in the country looking
for men to work. But why are there unemployed in the cities, while
there is already a demand for men in the country? Why, because many of
the unemployed ain't fit for us to take into our homes as hired men,
and many don't know that there's such a chance for them, and many if
they do know, would sooner starve in the cities than work and live on
a farm. I've got an idea that when the farming business is developed,
there'll be a big change in country life. Where there's plenty of
brains and push and enterprise, there's likely to be excitement.

"But it's got to come naturally; you can't pump interest into country
living by legislation. I had to laugh the other day when I was reading
a speech that Mr. John Morley made in Manchester, I think it was.
Anyway, he was arguing for parish councils, and he said that this
'gregarious instinct' that makes country people flock into towns that
are already overcrowded, is something that we ought to counteract
by making country life more interesting, and he thought that parish
councils would help to do that. Lord Salisbury got into him pretty well
a short time after, when he said in a speech that he never had thought
it was the duty of the government to provide amusement for the people,
but if _he_ was making a suggestion in that line, he would like to
recommend the circus.

"There's another reason besides the keen competition in other kinds of
business that makes me think that farming is going to be brought up
to the others, and that is, that so many of the colleges are teaching
scientific farming. You ain't going to see any very great result from
this in a year, nor in ten years, for there's a pretty big field to
work on. But when smart young fellows that are raised in the country,
and other smart young fellows that see a good chance to make something
at farming--when they all get a thorough training in scientific
farming, and when they all get down to work, just as they would in some
other highly developed form of production, you will see results. There
won't be much in shiftless farming when the scientific kind pretty
generally sets the pace.

"I've read a good deal, of late years, about 'organized charities' in
the cities, and it certainly does seem as if charity was a good deal
more sensible than it used to be. It's hard to see how there can be any
kind of serious destitution in the cities that ain't got some society
to relieve it. And the rich in the cities do certainly spend a powerful
lot of time and work and money in keeping up these charities and
amusements for the poor; but I don't see any signs that the poor love
the rich any more, nor that there's any less danger but that some day
they'll rise up in war against society.

"It seems to me that a good deal of all this time, and labor, and
money, and a good deal more besides, might be better spent in providing
that no child among the poor grows up without proper education,
technical education in useful trades; especially, I think, in
scientific farming.

"If the rich lived simpler and less showy, the poor wouldn't envy them
as much, nor feel as bitter against society, and the money that was
saved could be pretty well invested in kinds of education that would
cure poverty and destitution by preventing them, and the people that
would be thrown out of work by the economies of the rich might be a
good deal better employed in more productive work. It seems a pity,
anyway, to keep people at practically useless labor, when the brains
and the money that keep them employed in that way might be used in
keeping them at productive labor, and it's all the greater pity as long
as there's bitter want in the world for the necessaries of life."

This, in substance, is what he said. I apologize for the injustice
of the account, its vagueness in contrast with his clearness, its
circumlocutions in contrast with his crisp sententiousness, its
weakened renderings of his vigorous forms of native speech; but I have
tried to suggest it all, and to give the sense of its manly, wholesome
spirit.

Under the stars we sat talking until nearly midnight, and, quite
inevitably, we launched upon the subject of religion. Mr. Hill appeared
curiously apathetic, I thought, as I urged what seemed to me vital.
And when, at the end, he narrowed it all to the single inquiry as to
whether I believed in a real recognition in some future life among
those who have loved one another here, I found myself wondering, with a
feeling of disappointment, at so wide a drift from essentials, on the
part of a mind which had impressed me as so natively clear and strong.
I looked up in my surprise. Even in the starlight I could see the
tears, and from a single halting sentence, I got the hint of a daughter
dead in early childhood, and of a sorrow too deep for human speech, and
of an eager questioning of the future that was the soul's one great
desire.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now
I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known," was
all that I could say to him, and I went to bed pitying myself for my
shallow judgment, and my ignorance of life.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] I have presented here, together with ideas advanced by Mr. Hill,
others secured in fragmentary conversations with various farmers by the
way. These ideas seem to me to represent a body of accordant thinking.
It is fair to say that I also found among the farmers quite another
school of thought. This I shall try to present later with equal fulness.




CHAPTER VI

IN A LOGGING CAMP


FITZ-ADAMS'S CAMP, ENGLISH CENTRE, LYCOMING
COUNTY, PA., Tuesday, October 27, 1891.

In spite of the fast-falling rain, Fitz-Adams, the boss, ordered us
up at half-past four, as usual, this morning; but when breakfast was
over, the rain was too heavy to admit of our going to work. Some of the
woodsmen are gone back to bed, and some are mending their clothes in
the loft, and the rest of the gang are loafing in the "lobby," smoking,
and playing what they call "High, low, Jack and the game," except Mike,
a superb young Irishman, who, seated on a bench, with his back braced
against the window-sill, is reading a worn paper copy of one of the
Duchess's novels, which is the only book that I have so far seen in
the camp. Jennie, the head-cook and housekeeper, has given me leave to
write at one of the long tables where the gang is fed.

It is a relief sometimes to get away from the men. There may be _ennui_
that is more soul-destroying, but I have never known any that caused
such evidently acute suffering as the form which seizes upon workingmen
of my class in hours of enforced idleness. When the day's work is done,
they take their rest as a matter of course, and enjoy it. But a day
like this, which lays them off from work, and shuts them within doors,
furnishes awful evidence of the poverty of their lives. Most of the
men here can read, but not to one of them is reading a resource. The
men at play are in blasphemous ill-temper over the cards, and are,
apparently, on the brink of blows, while Mike is laboriously spelling
his way through a page, and nervously squirming in an effort to find
a comfortable seat. And I know, from the experience of Sundays, in
what humor the men will come down to dinner from the loft, to face an
afternoon of eternal length to them, which, in some way, must be lived
through.

I note the contrast with their normal selves the more, because, as
a body of workmen, this is much the most wholesomely happy company
which I have so far fallen in with. We are about twenty in number, a
curiously assorted crew, all bred to the roughest life. Far up in the
mountains, miles from any settlement, we live the healthful life of
a lumber camp, working from starlight to starlight; breathing the
mountain air, keen with the frosty vigor of autumn, and fragrant of
pine and hemlock; eating ravenously the plain, well-cooked food which
is served to us, now in the camp and now on the mountain-side, where we
sit among the newly stripped logs; sleeping deeply at night in closely
crowded beds in the cabin-loft, where the wind sweeps freely from
end to end through the gaping chinks between the logs, and where, on
rising, we sometimes slip out of bed upon a carpeting of snow. This is
the life which these men know and which half-unconsciously they love,
breaking from it at times, in a passion of discontent, and spending the
earnings of months in a short, wild _abandon_ of debauch, but always
coming back again, remorseful, ashamed to meet the faces of the other
men, yet reviving as by miracle under the touch of their native life.
They charm you with their freedom of spirit, and their rude sturdiness
of character, until you find your heart warming to them with a real
affection, and feeling for them the intimate pain of personal sorrow
at sight of their cruel limitations. Away from their work, their
one notion of the necessary accompaniment to leisure is money; and
possessed of time and treasure, their first instinctive reach is after
liquor and lust.

Even now as Fitz-Adams and his brother, in yellow oil-cloth coats and
wide tarpaulins, set out through the pouring rain in an open rig for
English Centre, there is a chorus of voices from the door and windows
of the cabin, shouting to them to bring back whiskey and plenty of it.
If they do, and the rain continues, only God knows what the camp will
be to-night.

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

It is sixty miles, I should judge, from Pleasant Hill to Williamsport,
and it proved a two days' march. Although the distance covered must
have been about the same on both days, the difference that they each
presented in actual experience of the journey was of the kind-of
contrast which a wayfarer must expect.

Monday was a faultless autumn day. The air was quick, and the roads
were in good condition, and I was feeling fit, and was "passing rich"
with three dollars and seventy-five cents, the wages of five days on
the farm.

The region through which I walked was typical of the open country of
the Middle States. Over its rolling surface was the varied arrangement
of wood and field and pasture-land, with the farmers' houses and barns
attesting separate possession. There were frequent brooks and narrow
winding country roads; roads lined with zigzag rail fences and loose
stone walls, along which dwarfed birches grew, and elderberry bushes,
and sumach, with wild grape-vines and clematis creeping on the walls;
while in the coarse turf on the banks, there blossomed immortelles, and
purple aster, and golden-rod.

Mr. Hill had given me clear directions. At the post-office of Irish
Lane I turned sharply toward Marshall's Hollow, and passed on the
way a camp-meeting ground, where deep in the shadows of a grove
stood numbers of rough wooden huts; grouped in chance community, and
little suggesting in the weird stillness of desertion, the sounds of
revival worship, with which they are made to ring through a part of
every summer. At Harveyville I turned abruptly up the hillside in the
direction of Cambra. It was high noon when I reached that village, and
I was but a few miles beyond it, on the way to Benton, when I stopped
to get something to eat. It was the evident poverty of the house where
I stopped that interested me. I knew that there was no hope of earning
a meal at such a place, but I could pay for what I ate, and I was sure
of being less of an annoyance there than at some well-to-do farmer's
house.

The cottage was an unpainted wooden shell, and, like it, the corn-crib
and pig-pen and little barn beyond seemed tottering to a fall. Faded
leaves of a woodbine, that climbed upon the cottage, were thick
about the door-way, and lay strewn by the wind upon the bare floor
within. There was but one room on the ground floor, and a stove and
a sewing-machine and a small wooden chest were all its furniture. I
knocked at the open door. Through an opposite one, communicating with a
lean-to, a woman appeared. She was large and muscular, but in her face
was the sickly pallor of ill-nourishment, and her hair was dishevelled,
and the loose, ragged dress which she wore was covered with dark,
greasy stains.

I asked for bread and milk; she explained that the family had just
finished dinner, but that she could give me something, if I would wait,
and she invited me to a seat on the chest.

I drew from my pack an unfinished newspaper, and as I read I could
feel innumerable eyes upon me. Through the cracks in the door, and the
ragged breaks in the plaster, came the inquisitive gaze of children's
eyes, and I could hear their eager whispers as a swarm of children
crowded one another for possession of the best peep-holes.

Their mother asked me in, and set before me, on a table littered with
remnants of dinner, a pitcher of fresh milk and some huge slices
of coarse bread, a large yellow bowl, and a pewter tablespoon. The
children stared at me as I ate, and I tried to form an accurate
estimate of their number, but despaired when, after I thought that
I had distinguished eight, I found my estimate upset by sudden
apparitions of faces hitherto unrecognized. The oldest child seemed
not more than twelve, and the youngest lay asleep in a cradle near the
stove, where its mother could rock it as she worked. They all were as
ragged and dirty as the children of the slums, but they had nothing
of the vivacity of these, nor of the quick adjustment to changing
circumstances which gives to children, bred upon the street, their
first hold upon your interest.

Stolid and wide-eyed they stood about the room, intently watching me,
moving here and there for new points of view; until their mother, who
had showed no wish to talk as she washed the dishes, now broke the
silence with a sounding cuff upon the ear of a little boy, as, with a
loud command, she sent him sobbing into the back yard to fetch her wood.

The children scattered instantly, except a little girl with flaxen
hair and grotesquely dirty face, who clung to her mother's skirts, and
seemed to hamper her immeasurably; the more so as the baby had wakened
in the noise, and had begun to cry. I grew sick with fear of what was
coming next, but the mother's mood had changed; for catching the crying
baby in her arms, she almost smothered it with kisses, and sitting down
she fondled it, and gently stroked the head of the child beside her.

It was a veritable country slum, with nearly all the barren squalor of
a crowded tenement. You thought of life in it as some hard necessity,
from which all choice and spontaneity are gone. And so in great part
it must have been, and the wonder was the stronger at sight of the
instinct of mother love, springing like a living fountain in an arid
plain.

The village of Benton wore a preoccupied air when I entered it. I soon
found the cause in an auction sale of horses in the stable-yard of the
tavern. The horses huddled close, as if for common protection, in an
angle formed by the buildings. They were watched by a mounted rider,
whose duty it was to prevent any from breaking loose. A small crowd
of farmers and village men, all of them coatless and in their working
clothes, formed a semicircle about the animals. The surrounding doors
and windows were full of women's faces, alive with interest in the
progress of events; and children perched upon the fences, or dodged in
and out among the groups of men. A fat and ruddy auctioneer walked back
and forth excitedly before the crowd, loudly repeating a call for bids;
or having caught one, running it rapidly through changes of inflection
and intonation, until a fresh bid started him anew on his flight of
varying tones, which ended at last in the dying cadences of "Going!
going! gone!"

Presently I found a man who was so far unoccupied by the sale as to
have leisure to direct me on my way. Taking his advice I started for
Union Church and Unityville. In the outskirts of Benton, as I left
the village, an urchin sat upon the door-step of a cottage, idly
beating about him with a stick, consoling himself apparently as best
he could for not having been allowed to go to the sale. The sight of
a tramp with a pack upon his back diverted him; and far as the sound
could carry there came following me, as I climbed the hill beyond the
village, his shouts of "Git there, Eli!"

The contrast with Monday's march appeared at once on Tuesday morning.
The clouds which were threatening when I made an early start grew more
threatening while I walked on, and they broke in torrents of rain as I
entered Lairdsville, with Williamsport still twenty-four miles away.

A tavern gave me shelter, but presently the rain slackened and I made
up my mind to push on to Williamsport in spite of the storm, for my
letters were there; and once on the road with your mail definitely in
view, you grow highly impatient of delays.

An hour's rain had worked great changes in the roads. Hard and dusty
when I set out in the early morning, they were quagmires now and were
running with muddy streams. The rain pelted my face and dripped through
my ragged hat, and trickled down my back and washed into my boots. I
was a dangerous-looking vagrant when I reached Hughesville at noon. I
walked rapidly through the village street in some fear of arrest, but
the storm had passed, and I soon learned the road to Williamsport by
way of Hall's Landing.

Splashing wearily along the heavy roads with that awful load chafing my
back, I knew vaguely that I was passing through an exceedingly rich and
beautiful farming region, but my interest was all in the surest footing
to be found, and it was with glad relief that late in the afternoon I
stepped upon the solid pavements of the town.

I had been told, on the road, of a laborer's cottage in Church Street
where cheap board and lodging could be had. From the post-office I
readily found my way to this cottage, and was soon propped up in bed
reading my letters, while the laborer's wife hung up my clothes to dry
in the kitchen and put my boots under the stove.

In the morning all the brilliance of the clear, cold autumn had
returned. It was such a day as seems to emerge renewed with fresh and
ample vigor from the cleansing of a storm.

The streets presented a really singular picture. The town itself is
the conventional American, provincial, manufacturing centre, with its
business portion built up in "brick blocks," which are innocent of
any attraction but utility. From this quarter it shades gradually, in
one direction, into the workshops and cottages of the region of the
proletariat, and in another into the wide, well-shaded avenues where
are the somewhat ostentatious homes and churches of the well-to-do.

Long lines of booths now crowded the curves about the central public
square and reached far down the communicating streets. In these booths
the farming people of the surrounding country sold their fruits and
garden vegetables, and butter and eggs and poultry; and white-aproned
butchers spread their meats in tempting array. It was an Oriental
bazaar in all but color and the highly pitched jabber of Eastern
bargaining. But still more perfect as a reproduction of foreign scenes
were the groups of women who, with colored shawls tied round their
heads and falling about their shoulders, sat on the steps of public
buildings with baskets of provisions about them and talked among
themselves, and came to terms with customers in their oddly mixed
vernacular.

It recalled at once the Platz of a German city thronged by peasant
women on market days, only here, too, was a lack of color. The women
were unmistakably Teutonic. All had the generous contour of countenance
which approaches to a family likeness in a whole race of peasantry,
but the red of the old country complexion had faded to our prevailing
pallor.

In spite of a large foreign element, or in virtue of it, I do not know
which, the town itself is aggressively American. The fact that some
hundreds of million feet of lumber come each year from its mills gives
to it great importance as a lumber centre. And the good fortune of this
form of industry the city certainly shows in its freedom from the usual
begriming effects of manufacture on a large scale.

In one of the morning papers of the town I found the spirit of the
place expressed in a reported speech of a local celebrity, an ex-member
of Congress. The chief burden of it was the note of congratulation to
the people of the town on their progress and prosperity, as indicated
in their electric lights and rapid transit system, and in their growing
industries and increasing numbers, which, he declared, "had passed the
stopping-point."

But I must hurry on. Early on Friday afternoon, October 9th, I set out
from Williamsport, with Oil City as my next objective point. I had no
money, but this did not disturb me, for I was entering the open country
and felt sure of finding work. The road lay along the fertile river
bottom and then began to climb the range of hills which walls in the
valley on the north. The lasting impression here is of a region of most
uncommon natural wealth. Many square miles of farms come into the range
of vision; the soil looks like a deep, rich loam. And a like impression
comes to you from the opposite bank of the river, where the land lies
flat to the foot of the southern range of hills.

From such a vantage ground you see at a glance how the river, shut in
by these barriers, could have risen to so great a height in the flood
of 1889 and have worked such appalling disaster.

There are constant references to "the flood" among the inhabitants of
the valley, and it plainly holds for them the place of a chronological
mark not unlike that held farther East by the "blizzard" of 1888,
only it sounds not a little odd at first to hear common reference to
antediluvian events.

Presently I came to a road which forked at Linden to the right, and
made in the direction of a gap in the hills. Its general course seemed
westward, and so I followed it. An hour or two later it had led me
into a forest, where the sunlight was fast fading. I was intent on the
question of finding work before nightfall, when I heard the rumble of
wheels behind me, and a voice singing a German song.

I looked up as the wagon came alongside. The horses were walking
slowly up the hill, and a young man lounged at leisure on the seat.
His legs were crossed, and the reins lay loosely in one hand. A light,
wide-brimmed felt hat was pushed back on his crown, and from under the
rim the yellow hair rested on his forehead. He was singing from sheer
lightness of heart; and young and strong and handsome as he was, he
made you think of Alvary in his part of _Siegfried_.

"Have a ride?" he called to me, and there was no trace of foreign
accent in his speech.

"Thank you," I said; and in another moment my pack was in the bottom of
the wagon and I on the seat beside the driver.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm looking for a job."

"You want work on a farm?"

"Yes, that or any other kind of work that I can get."

"Well, there ain't much doing on the farms now. I don't know nobody
that's looking for a hired man. There's Abe Potter, I heard him say
as how he wanted to hire a man to work for him all winter; but Miss'
Potter, she told my wife last night that he'd got Jim Hale's boy, Al,
to live out to him. Say, did you ever work in the woods?"

"No."

"Well, there's plenty of work in the woods. It's a rough life, but it
ain't so bad when you're used to it. I worked in the woods before I
was married. I could go out to the woods now, and earn two dollars a
day and my keep; but my wife wouldn't let me. And it's a pretty rough
life, only I come to like it. But I've got my farm now, and my wife and
children; and her old folks lives with us, and I've got to stay to
home, and take care of things. Say, where are you going to-night?"

"I don't know. I'll try to find some place to stay where I can help
with the work to pay for my keep; and then to-morrow I'll go to the
woods, and try to get a job."

"I tell you, stranger, you stay at my house to-night, and in the
morning you can go to English Centre. I guess you'll get a job on one
of the camps."

My thanks could have expressed but little of the gratitude I felt.
I shared his light-hearted mood at once, and was a very interested
and attentive listener to the narrative of his early life; his
disagreements with his father, and how he had inherited the farm from
him burdened with debt, but had almost paid the mortgages, and had his
eye now upon a neighbor's farm with a view to purchasing that.

He was singing again as we drove up the lane toward his home, and
was plainly expectant. The cause was clear when two children, a girl
and boy of about six and four, came running toward the wagon, with
excited cries of welcome. They drew up sharply at sight of a stranger,
and their father loudly greeted them with a medley of affectionate
diminutives in English and German, until they lost their fear, and
began to talk rapidly with him in the quaintest German, which sounded
as though it might be one with the strange dialects which you see in
_Fliegende Blätter_.

I helped to unhitch the horses, and then asked whether there was more
that I could do. There were apples to be picked up from under the trees
in the orchard, and I worked at this task until dark, when there came
the call to supper.

After that meal the children were put to bed, and the rest of us
gathered in the kitchen, where a large open fire burned, and an
oil-lamp lent its light. An "apple-butter making" was to be the feature
of the next day's work, and we spent the evening in getting ready for
it.

We sat in a semicircle in front of the fire, first the farmer's wife,
and then the patriarchal grandfather, who was almost deaf, and was
known to all the household by the not euphonious name of "Gross-pap,"
and next to him the grandmother, and last the guest. The farmer himself
sat at a table near us, briskly working an apple-peeler, while the rest
of us removed the cores, and cut the apples into small sections.

It was a very comfortable place which I seemed to have found in the
household. I was taken in with natural hospitality, and the family
life moved on unhampered by my presence, while I, a welcome guest,
could sit and watch it at my ease.

The old man had every excuse for silence, and he and his wife spoke
rarely, and always in their native tongue, but they evidently
understood English perfectly. The farmer and his wife spoke English to
each other, and spoke it as though born to its use, but they used that
quaint German dialect in talking with the old people and the children.

The wife was a plain woman, inclined to fretfulness, I thought, and
she had a certain air with her husband, which is not uncommon to plain
women whose husbands are distinctly handsome. She had little to say,
but she listened attentively to the farmer's talk.

He was entertainment for us all. Good-looking, high-spirited, manly
fellow--in perfect unconsciousness of self, he talked on with the
genial freedom of a true man of the world.

His trip to Williamsport was a fruitful theme, and no least event of
the journey was without its interest. He told us of the neighbors whom
he met on the road, and all of his conjectures regarding their probable
errands. He had taken a load of vegetables to town, and now recounted
every sale and purchase, for he had been charged with many commissions.
One was the purchase of braid for his wife's new dress. He was full of
good-humor at each fresh departure in his tale; but, for some reason,
the story of this last commission pleased him most. With high regard
for circumstantial detail, he told it to us at least five times, and
ended every narrative with a beaming smile, and the unvarying remark
that "I'd have got it wider if I'd only known," to which his wife
replied each time with unfaltering insistence upon the last word: "But
you might have known."

In the morning he was as cheerful as on the night before, and he put me
in high spirits as, with many good wishes for my success, he told me
again how sure he was that I could find work in the woods.

At Salladasburg I stopped for further directions about the way to
English Centre; and the tavern-keeper, at whose door I inquired,
confirmed me strongly in my expectation of ready employment.

An old plank road lead me through a mountain-pass, and along the course
of a stream, far into the interior. The earlier miles of the march were
among mountains that had long been stripped of all valuable timber, and
that now stood ragged and uncouth in their new growths, and in the
blackened remnants of forest fires.

Here there were a few scattered farms; stony and of thin soil, where,
for fences, uptorn stumps of trees had been placed side by side, with
their twisted roots so interwoven as to form an impenetrable barrier.

A caravan of gypsies met and passed me; but except for these, the road
was almost deserted, and seemed to be leading into yet lonelier regions.

Mountains now succeeded, on which the forests were untouched, and
which, in autumn colors, were like huge mounds of foliage plant, so
richly did the gorgeous hues of the maple-trees and chestnuts and
beeches blend with the dark greens of hemlock and pine.

At a little after noon I came quite suddenly upon an iron bridge that
crossed the wide bed of a mountain-stream, which was little more than
a brook now, but gave evidence of rising, at times, to the volume
and strength of a torrent. A large tavern stood near the bridge, and
beyond it, to the right, was a huge tannery which plainly provided the
chief industry of the place. The village street was lined with rows of
wooden cottages, each an unpainted duplicate of its neighbor, and all
eloquent, I thought, of the monotony of the life which they held.

I went at once to the post-office, and there learned that my journey
was by no means at an end; for the lumber camps were yet some miles
farther in the mountains. The camp of "Wolf Bun" was mentioned as an
important one, where work was plenty, and I set out at once for that.

I was tired and not a little hungry; for this mountain-air acts always
as a whet upon your appetite, and I had eaten nothing since the early
morning, and had already walked some fifteen miles. But the camp road,
although rough, was easy to follow, and I found much satisfaction in
dramatizing my approach to some short-handed employer, who would take
me on at once. I dwelt longingly on supper and a restful night and
Sunday in the camp, and thought hopefully of the work to be begun on
Monday morning.

And then there was a peculiar interest in meeting lumbermen on the way.
Some were teamsters, who sat high in air on top of immense loads of
bark, which they were carting to the tannery. Many of these wore wide
sombreros, and jackets made of blanket stuff in gay plaids. Others were
on foot, small companies of four and five together, walking to the
village, for it was Saturday afternoon.

I was prepared for some degree of roughness in a lumber camp, and in
the woodsmen themselves, but there was something in the appearance
of these men whom I met that hinted at my not having guessed all
the truth. I judged of roughness by what I knew of the gang at West
Point, and in the sewer ditch at the Asylum, but here was something
of a widely different kind from the hardness of broken-spirited,
time-serving laborers. Instinctively you knew these men for men; and
I respectfully kept silence, and looked to them for greeting, and got
none.

When you, a total stranger, try to meet the questioning gaze of five
strong men at once, all of them sturdy and lean, and deeply lined in
face and keen of eye, there is bred in you a vague unease, not of fear,
but an answering to that wonder as to what you are and what you are
doing there. I was conscious then only of the disturbing of my earlier
confidence in entering the woods. I could not analyze the look which
met me, but now I know it for meaning, reft of its strongest words,
"Who in ---- are you? Gospel sharks we know, and camp cooks, and honest
Jew pedlers who get our wages from us for their brass-gold watches and
glass jewels, but such a ----! ----! ----! ----! ----! ----! as you, we
never saw before."

It was about the middle of the afternoon when a turn in the
mountain-road brought to view a cluster of log-cabins, which I knew to
be the camp of Wolf Run. The cabins were splendid buildings of their
kind. The logs were clean and fresh and were securely fitted, while the
chinks were well plastered with mud, and the roofs tightly shingled,
and the gables closely boarded-up.

No one was in sight from where I stood; but there issued, from one of
the smaller cabins, the ring of a blacksmith's hammer, and I found a
group of men about the cabin-door.

The camp stood in a little clearing on the mountain; and in contrast
with the shadowy gloom in the forest around it, the sunlight flooded
this open rift with concentrated light. The chestnut-trees on the edge
of the wood shone like burnished gold, and the maple leaves, still
green, nearest to the trees, and but lightly touched with red along the
boughs, deepened gradually, until, in the full sunlight, they blazed
in crimson splendor. It was still with the stillness of autumn, and
the sound of the blacksmith's stroke and the answering ring of the
anvil were echoed far into the forest, where you could hear, fretting
down its stony bed, a mountain-stream, which, in the speech of the
lumbermen, is called a "run."

I had slipped the pack from my back, and carrying it in my hand I went
up to a group of men. One of them stood leaning against the door-post.
He was very tall and straight, and under his wide sombrero, the upper
forehead was white and smooth as a girl's. The brows were arched above
dark-brown eyes, and his nose was straight and sharply chiselled; the
cheeks were lean and ruddy brown; and under a light mustache was a
clean-cut, shapely mouth that answered in strength to a well-rounded,
slightly protruding chin. His hands were thrust into the side-pockets
of a bright blanket jacket, and his dark trousers were tucked into a
pair of top-boots, that were laced over the insteps and up the outer
sides of the legs.

All the men were eying me with that disturbing look; even the
blacksmith had quit his work and joined them. In the questioning
silence I summoned what courage I had, and walked up to young Achilles
at the cabin-door, and thus addressed him:

"Is this the camp of Wolf Run?"

"Yes."

"Is Mr. Benton here?" [Benton is my version of the superintendent's
name.]

"No, he's in English Centre."

"Is the camp boss here?" [That was a rash plunge on my part, but it was
successful.]

"Yes, that's him," and Achilles' head nodded slightly in the direction
of the largest cabin. From the door nearest us there stepped an elderly
man of massive frame, bent slightly forward, and with arms so long that
the hands seemed to reach to his knees. He was dressed in an old suit
of dark material--a long-tailed coat that fitted very loosely, and
baggy trousers--and a soiled linen shirt and collar, and a black ribbon
necktie. His face was very set and stern, not with an expression of
unkindness, simply the face of a man to whom life is a serious matter,
and who means business all the time.

He was evidently absorbed, and, carrying an iron bar, he was about to
enter the forge with no least notice of any of us, when I interrupted
him.

"I beg your pardon, sir, I understand that you are the boss."

He stood still, and looked down upon me out of keen black eyes from
under shaggy brows that bristled with coarse hairs; and in the
deepening silence, I wondered what I should say next.

"I'm looking for a job, and I heard in English Centre that men were
wanted here."

"Have you ever worked in the woods?"

"No."

"Then you'll not get work in the woods this side of hell."

He moved on at once, and the blacksmith followed him into the shop.
I was left standing in the midst of the other men, who had listened
intently, and were now soberly enjoying the quality of that _bon mot_,
and were eyeing me in leisurely curiosity.

Again I appealed to Achilles:

"Is there another camp near here?"

"There's Long's Camp, a quarter of a mile up the run," and a slight
inclination of his head indicated the way.

Mr. Long did not want me, and knew of no one who might, if I was not
wanted at Wolf Run, unless, on second thought, I could get a job at
Fitz-Adams's Camp.

"And where is that?" I asked.

"You remember a road which forked to the left about two mile back as
you came up from English Centre?"

"Yes."

"Well, you follow that road about two mile and a half, and you'll come
to Fitz-Adams's Camp."

The road was the roughest that I had so far travelled. It cut its
way along the sheer side of the mountain, following the course of the
run. Presently I came to a small log cabin, where, in a little yard
beside it, a cow was munching straw, and in front, a fat sow wallowed
in a pool in the middle of the road. An old Irishman, who sat on the
door-step, told me that I was not half a mile from the camp.

There was a stout log dam on the run a little farther up, but the gates
were open and only a slender stream flowed through the muddy bottom,
for the dam was undergoing repairs. Near by was a cabin large enough
for a score of lumbermen.

The sun had sunk behind the mountain a good half hour before; not even
the trees on the summits were lighted up with its setting rays, and the
still, clear air bit you with a sudden chill. All the confidence which
I had felt in the morning was gone; it was a very tired and hungry, a
sobered and a chastened proletaire, that at length caught sight, in the
gloom, of Fitz-Adams's Camp.

It stood in a clearing like the camp of Wolf's Run. On the highest area
was a long, stout log cabin, to which there was given an added air of
security by an earth embankment, which sloped from the ground to the
lower logs all around the building, as a means of preventing the air
from sweeping under the floors. A door was in the end of the cabin
nearest me, and a window was cut in the boarded gable above. A wooden
block served as a step to the door, and near this a grindstone swung
in its frame. On the outer walls of the cabin were tacked some half
dozen advertisements on tin, bidding you, in black letters on an orange
background, "Chew----Cut." Over a rough bridge that crossed the run
near the cabin, I could faintly see one or two other smaller buildings
like it, which proved to be the blacksmith's shop, and the stable for
the teamsters' horses. The mountain-road continued its course past the
main cabin, and disappeared among the trees in the gorge. So narrow
was the ravine, that the mountain rose abruptly from one side of the
cabin, and in much the same manner from the bank of the run on the
opposite side, leaving a valley scarcely thirty yards in width. The
larger timber had been cut away, but the mountain-sides, all about the
clearing and the road, were dense with poplar, and white-barked birch
and chestnut, and the younger growths of evergreen.

There was perfect quiet in the camp; not a living thing was to be seen
or heard. I went up to the nearest door, and knocked. There was no
answer. I knocked again, and still there was no answer. At the side,
far to the rear, I found another door, and knocked there. It opened
instantly, and in the twilight I could faintly see a young woman in a
dark print dress.

"Is this Fitz-Adams's Camp?"

"Yes."

"Is Mr. Fitz-Adams here?"

And then in louder voice over her shoulder into the darkness behind her:

"Say, Jim, here's a man that wants you."

There was the sound of heavy footsteps upon the wooden floor, and in
another moment Fitz-Adams stood framed in the door-way.

I was standing on the ground, quite two feet below, and looking up at
him in that uncertain light, he seemed to me gigantic. A great muscular
frame fairly filled the door. He was dressed in a suit of light-gray
corduroy, a flannel shirt, a dark felt hat, and top-boots, and I
could see that he was young and not unhandsome, although of a very
different type of good looks from those of Achilles. His large, round
head rested close upon a trunk that was massive yet quite splendidly
shapely, and highly suggestive of agility and strength. His face was
round, and the features full and of uncertain moulding, but you did not
miss the evidence of strength in his thick, firm lips and the clear,
unfaltering eyes with their expression of perfect unconsciousness of
self. He was plainly Irish, but quite as plainly of American birth,
which was clear when he spoke.

"I'm looking for a job," I began, "and I've come to see whether I can
get one here."

"Who sent you?"

"They told me in Long's Camp that I might get a job here."

"They didn't want you, and so they sent you to me, eh?"

"They said that they didn't need more men there."

"Oh, they did, did they? And you've worked in the woods before, I
suppose?"

"No, but I have worked at other kinds of work, and if you'll give me a
chance you can see what I can do, and then you can discharge me if you
don't want me."

"Well, there's lots of work in this camp, Buddy. I don't guess from the
cut of you and the way you talk, that you know much about it. But you
can stay, and I'll see what's in you on Monday. Look lively now, and
split some of that wood, and build a fire in the lobby."

A pile of dry wood which had been sawed into lengths of two feet, lay
near the kitchen-door. On top of the pile was an axe; and as quickly
as I could, I split up an armful, and carried it around to the front of
the cabin and into the lobby. Near the centre of this room, which is
the loafing-place for the men, was an iron stove long enough to admit
the sticks which I had cut. It was the work of a minute to arrange
some chips in the bottom of the stove, and to pile the wood loosely on
top of these. I was about to touch a match to the finer stuff, when
Fitz-Adams appeared with a tin can in his hand. He bent over the stove,
and opening the door wide, he tossed in the contents of the can, and
the room was instantly full of a strong odor of kerosene.

In another moment the fire was blazing like mad, and roaring up the
stove-pipe, and fast turning the old cracked stove red hot, but
Fitz-Adams stood by in perfect unconcern, and presently departed in the
direction of the kitchen.

I began to look about me in the light that shone through the gleaming
cracks. Swift shadows were chasing one another over the walls and
ceiling, and I soon grew familiar with a room about twelve feet deep,
and which extended the width of the cabin. The floor was bare, and
was very damp with the Saturday's scrubbing, as were also the benches
which reached all round the walls. Besides the stove, the only piece
of furniture that the room contained was a heavy table, about four feet
square, which stood close to the benches in one corner, and directly
under the single window of the room, which was a small opening in the
logs, fitted with four panes of glass. A rough wooden staircase led
from the near corner through an opening in the ceiling to the loft; and
a door was cut through the thin board partition which separates the
lobby from the large room in the body of the cabin, where the men are
fed, and where I am writing now. The logs that formed the outer walls
of the room had been rough-hewn to a plane; and along these walls, on
two sides of the room, was a line of nails, on which hung coats and
hats and flannel shirts and overalls. On the partition-wall there was
nailed a small mirror with a little shelf below, on which lay a comb.
Near this were three wooden rollers, and over them as many towels,
large and coarse and fresh from the wash.

I found a dry spot on the bench near the stove, and shoving my pack
under me, I sat down, facing the outer door, and awaited developments.

It had grown quite dark Without. The young woman who met me at the
kitchen-door now came in with a small oil-lamp, which she placed on
the shelf near the mirror. I began to think that the men must all have
left the camp for Sunday, and my spirits rose at the thought of an easy
initiation into camp life. But I was soon roused from this revery by
the sound of many footsteps approaching the cabin, and the deep, gruff
voices of men.

The wooden latch lifted, the heavy door swung open, and there came
trooping in a crew of fifteen lumbermen, all dripping water from their
hair and faces and hands, for they were fresh from the evening wash in
the run. They went first to the towels, and then formed in line for
their turns at the mirror, where the comb was passed from hand to hand.

Fifteen pairs of wet, blinking eyes were fixed on me, and I was obliged
to meet each searching gaze in turn. But when this ordeal was passed, I
began to feel a little at my ease, for the men ignored me completely.
The air with which they turned away from the inspection seemed to say:
"There is something exceedingly irregular in there being in the camp so
abnormal a specimen as this, but the way in which to treat the case, at
least for the present, is to let it alone." It was precisely the manner
of well-bred men toward, let us say, some inharmonious figure in their
club, whose presence is for the moment unaccounted for.

As they finished their preparation for supper, the men crowded about
the stove to warm their hands, chilled by the cold ablution. Chiefly
they talked shop about the day's work, but in terms that were often
unintelligible to me, and the sentences were surcharged with oaths. I
watched them with deep personal interest, and pictured myself in line,
and wondered whether I should ever be so fortunate as to find a clean,
dry section on a towel, or come early to the much-used comb.

The last man had barely completed his toilet when the door in the
partition opened, and a woman's voice announced supper. Instantly there
was loud shuffling of heavy boots on the bare floor, and a momentary
press about the door, and then we were soon seated at one of the two
long tables in the mess-room of the cabin, and there arose a clatter of
hungry men feeding, and the hubbub of their talk.

The meal was excellent. Its chief dish was corned beef and cabbage, and
there were boiled potatoes and boiled beans besides, with abundance of
home-made white bread, and strong hot tea.

My seat was last in the row on one side of the table. The end seat was
unoccupied, and my nearest neighbor ignored me; I was free to satisfy a
well-developed appetite, and grow more familiar with my surroundings.

First of all I ate a very hearty supper. The food was admirably cooked,
and was served with a high degree of cleanness. The oil-cloth, of
marble design, which covered the table was spotless, and the rude,
coarse service, befitting a camp, had all been thoroughly washed. It
is true that the men were without their coats, most of them with their
waistcoats off, but these are men whose work is of the cleanest, and
there was nothing in all the setting of the supper to mar a healthy
appetite; there was much, I thought, that really heightened the
pleasure of eating.

The conversation ran on as it had begun in the lobby. There was much
talk about the progress of the work, and gossip about neighboring
camps, and proposals for the disposing of Sunday; and it struck me with
swift terror that the presence of the three young women, who waited
on the table, was no least check to profanity. The talk never rose to
the pitch of excitement, it was the mere give and take of ordinary
conversation, and yet there mingled in it the blackest oaths. With a
curse of eternal perdition upon his lips, a man would speak to his
neighbor of some casual incident of the day, and would end his sentence
with a volley of nameless insults and hideous blasphemies. This was
their common language. With no realization of what they did, they flung
eternal curses and foul insults at one another in lightest banter.

Half an hour later we had all returned to the lobby. The teamsters lit
their lanterns, and went to care for the horses. Some of the men went
up into the loft. Four had soon started a game of cards at the table,
while most of the others filled the bench near the stove, or drew empty
beer-kegs and old soap-boxes from their hiding, and completed the
circle around the fire. Everyone was smoking, and all seemed highly
content.

I was crowded in between a lank young fellow with dark hair and eyes,
and a long, lean nose, who was swearing comfortably at a gawky youth
across the stove, and an older man, of heavier build, who had fine
black eyes and a black mustache, a very pale complexion, and long black
hair that lay in pasty ringlets about his face and on his neck.

Soon I came to know these two as "Long-nosed Harry" and "Fred the
Barber." I should explain at once that the camps have a curious
nomenclature of their own. As among other workingmen whom I have known,
so here, only a man's Christian name is used, but it is nearly always
accompanied with an explanatory phrase. A new-comer in the camp is
called "Buddy" until his name is learned, and some appropriate epithet
is found, or until a nickname springs complete from the mysterious
source of those appellatives.

I knew that Fred the Barber was making ready to speak to me, and I was
on my guard, when, while the talk was running high, I heard a voice
close to my ear:

"Say, Buddy, you ain't a pedler, are you?"

"No."

"I thought you warn't." And Fred the Barber settled farther down upon
his seat, and folded his arms, and puffed in silence on his pipe, with
the air of a man who finds deep satisfaction in his own sagacity. Soon
he returned to the cross-examination.

"Say, Buddy, are you going to work in the woods?"

"Yes, the boss took me on this evening."

"Ain't you never worked in the woods before?" His pipe was out of his
mouth now, and his eyes shone with a livelier interest.

"No."

"How's that?"

"Why, I'm working my way out West, and my money gave out in
Williamsport; and when I went looking for a job, I was told that I
could get work in the woods. So I came up here."

"Well, you ain't struck a soft snap, Buddy. Jim the Boss is a square
man, but he can beat the devil at work, and he don't go easy on a new
hand. This is my tenth season in the woods, and I earn two dollars a
day right along; but I'm going to quit, it's too rough."

There was a sudden commotion just then, for the outer door had opened
to the touch of a young woodsman, who, standing sharply defined against
the black night, regarded the company with a radiant smile. He was
the finest specimen of them all; not much over twenty, I should say,
and grown to a good six feet of height, and as straight as the trees
among which he worked. Through the covering of rough clothes you felt
with delight the curves of his splendid figure, and the sinewy muscles
in symmetrical development. And then the lines of his throat and neck
were so clean and strong, and his face charmed you with its fresh
beauty, and its expression of frank joyousness. No wonder that he was
a favorite in the camp. The men were rising from their seats, and the
air was full of welcome, while he stood there for a moment, his teeth
gleaming as he smiled, and his eyes shining with delight.

[Illustration: THE MEN WERE RISING FROM THEIR SEATS, AND THE AIR WAS
FULL OF WELCOME.]

There rose a tumult of loud voices:

"I'm eternally lost, if it ain't Dick the Kid!" "Dickie, me boy, you
God-forsaken whelp, are ye drunk?" "You ain't spent it all in two days,
have you, Dick?" "Shut that lost door, and sit down by this condemned
fire, you ill-begotten cur, and eternal torment be your lot!" "Tell us
what hellish thing brings you here, you blessed boy, and why--ripe for
endless misery as you are--why ain't you in Williamsport?"

The smile did not fade from Dick's face, as with easy deliberation
he took a seat on a beer-keg and looked at the crew with answering
affection in his eyes.

"I'm forever lost if I've been to Williamsport," he began. "And I
ain't drunk a drop, you perjured hell-hounds of shameless begetting.
I've got all my reprobate stuff with me except the two God-condemned
dollars that it's cost me to live at the Temperance House in English
Centre, where you can get for a quarter the best meal that any of you
unveracious ones, you food for unquenchable fire, ever ate."

God help us! it was like that, only a great deal worse, until the
blessed stillness of the night fell upon the camp.

For an hour or more Dick the Kid sat talking to the other men. A
stranger in English Centre had fired his ambition for the lumber-camps
in the mountains somewhere in West Virginia, and Dick was freely
imparting his plans--how he meant to beat his way to Harrisburg and
then to Pittsburg, and so on to his destination, hoarding, the while,
his savings of about sixty-five dollars, as capital to launch him in a
new enterprise, where he was sure that more money could be made than
here.

The men listened in rapt attention, knowing perfectly that Williamsport
was the destined end of Dick's journey, and that the dram-shops there
and brothels would get every dollar to the last; yet charmed by his
fresh enthusiasm, which touched a hidden memory, or gave momentary
flight to some new-fledged hope that fluttered in their breasts. He was
so young and strong and handsome, so full of life, so rich in native
gifts that win and hold affection with no thought of effort! One knew
it from the clear, keen joyance of the man, and the power which he
had to hold the others, and to draw out their hardy sympathy. I could
endure the sight no longer; I went out to the mountain-road, and
waited where I thought that Dick would pass.

He was startled when I stopped him, and instinctively he clenched his
fists. For a moment I had a vivid sense of my physical insignificance,
as I realized how easily, with a single blow, he could smash in my
countenance and make swift end of me.

"I'm a new man in the camp," I began. "The boss took me on this
evening. I was interested in what you said about going to West
Virginia, and I wanted to ask you more about it. Have you ever been
there?"

"No."

"You are sure that there's a good chance for a man there?"

"It's all straight, Buddy, if that's what you mean."

I told him frankly what I meant, but he was still on his guard, and
presently he broke in abruptly with

"Say, Buddy, you're a sky-pilot, ain't you?"

We walked on together for a mile or more, and Dick grew friendly, and
I lost my heart to him completely. Only once Dick warmed a little at a
question from me. Perhaps I had no right to ask it upon so slight an
acquaintance; but as there was little prospect of my ever seeing him
again, I asked him if he felt no sense of wrong in using lightly the
name of the Almighty.

I can see him now as he stood against the blackness of the forest under
the clear, still stars, and answered me, with protest in his eyes and
in his voice:

"By the Eternal, Buddy, I ain't swore for a month! May the Infinite
consign me to the tortures of all fiends, if I've swore for a month!
That? Oh, that ain't nothing; that's the way that us fellows talks. If
you live in the camp long enough, Buddy, you'll hear a man swear."

His face was even more attractive in its expression of manly
seriousness when we stood on the roadside at parting, and he put a firm
hand on my shoulder, and fixed clear eyes on mine, as he told me, in
his frank, open way, that he wanted to make a man of himself and not
be a drunken sot, and that, in this new venture before him, he would
honestly try, and would ask for help.

The men were going to bed when I got back to camp. I took my pack and
followed them into the loft, where I found three long rows of beds,
reaching nearly the length of the cabin. At my knock the boss came out
of his room, which is a lightly boarded-in corner of the loft, and
gave me a bed next to that occupied by "Old Man Toler."

I had noticed Old Man Toler in the lobby as being markedly older than
most of the others. He was about fifty-five, I thought, of slender,
slightly stooping figure, and with gray hair. What had impressed me was
his exceedingly intelligent and agreeable face, and I had wondered at
sight of him as being apparently an ordinary hand in the crew. He gave
me a friendly greeting when the boss consigned me to his care, and then
resumed his conversation with a neighbor, while I made ready for bed.

The beds are simple arrangements, admirably suited to the ends which
they serve. A mattress and a bolster stuffed with straw lie upon a
rough wooden frame without springs, and on top of these are four or
five thicknesses of coarse blankets and tow "comforters." The men
creep under as many strata of bed-clothing as their individual tastes
prompt in a given temperature. And the temperature varies in the loft
in nearly exact conformity with its variations out of doors, for the
boards in the gables have sprung apart, and there are rifts even
between the logs, and the winds sweep with much freedom from end to end
of our large bedroom.

I soon became interested, too, in the varying tastes of the men in the
manner of their dress for bed. Some go so far on warmer nights as to
take off their boots and trousers, and even their coats and waistcoats.
Others stop at their boots and coats; and on the coolest nights not a
few go top-coated and booted to bed, and make a complete toilet in the
morning by putting on their hats.

There was more than one surprise for me that night, in the considerate,
well-bred manners of the men; and the whole experience of my stay in
camp has only served to deepen my appreciation. Young Arthur met, at
Rugby, the fate which a merely casual acquaintance with Sunday-school
literature would lead one to imagine as being unfailingly in store
for those who prefer to maintain their private habits in the company
of unsympathetic associates. It will be remembered that Arthur
became, while kneeling at his bedside on the evening of his first
day at school, a target for boots and unkind remarks, until Tom
Brown interfered. Schools have improved since those days, and it has
been gratifying to observe that a like improvement has spread among
workingmen, even so far as to embrace the lumber-camps. The momentary
expectation of a boot in violent contact with one's head is not a
devotion-fostering emotion, and it was a distinct relief to find no
least objection offered to a course of conduct however out of keeping
with the customs of the place.

There was another surprise in the comfort and the wholesome cleanliness
of my bed, notwithstanding its roughness. But in spite of physical
ease, I lay awake until after midnight, and when I slept at last,
troubled dreams pursued me; I awoke unrested, feeling sick at heart,
and little inclined to further acquaintance with a lumber camp.

But the morning brought a glorious day, clear and much warmer than
Saturday; and after a late breakfast (seven o'clock) I took a book into
the forest, found a comfortable seat, and read until nightfall, with
time enough for dinner taken out.

The men scattered widely soon after breakfast. Many visited neighboring
camps, or went shooting; some walked to English Centre; but it was a
perfectly sober crew that reassembled at the supper-table, and a much
cleaner-looking set than on the night before; for after breakfast, for
two hours or more, Fred the Barber had thriftily plied his trade.

We all went early to bed. The men hailed the day's end as bringing
welcome relief in release from intolerable restraint. When it grew
too dark to read, and I had returned to the cabin, I found in the
lobby several of the men who had loafed about the camp all day. They
were in vicious humor. They fretted like children long shut in by the
rain. They could not sit still in comfort, and their restlessness grew
upon them as they waited for supper, and the movement of time was slow
torture; and so they swore at one another and at the other men who were
returning to the camp, and who seemed in but little better humor than
themselves.




CHAPTER VII

IN A LOGGING CAMP (_Concluded_)


I slept soundly that night, and was awakened in the morning by the
mad clatter of an alarm-clock. It was about four o'clock. I could
hear Fitz-Adams getting up in the little chamber which serves him as
a sleeping-room and an office. He went below, and soon had the fires
roaring fiercely in the kitchen and lobby; and I could hear him call
to the women to get up and get breakfast. Next he appeared in the
loft, and aroused the teamsters. In an incredibly short time they were
dressed, and had lit their lanterns, and were gone to the stable to
feed and tend their horses.

I got up with them, and was nearly dressed, when the boss reappeared
in the loft. He walked down between the rows of beds, laying heavy
hands here and there upon sleeping figures, and raising his voice to
the call: "Come, roll out of this, you damn ---- ---- ----!" There was
no ill-temper in his manner or tone; it was simply his habitual way of
rousing the crew.

I was first at the run, first at the towels and comb, and was sitting
in warm comfort behind the stove when the other men came shambling from
the loft, their eyes blinking in the sudden light of the lobby.

We had beefsteak and potatoes and bread and coffee for breakfast. As
soon as he had finished his meal, I went up to the boss to remind him
of my existence, for he had in no way noticed me since Saturday night.

"You'll help the teamsters load bark, Buddy. Have you got any gloves?"

"No," I said.

"Then come this way." We went together to the office, and he spread
before me a number of new pairs of heavy skin gloves.

"I don't know which will be best suited to the work that you want me to
do," I said. "Won't you select a pair for me?"

"My advice to you, Buddy, is to wear them mits," and he pointed to a
pair of white pigskin mittens. "They'll cost you seventy-five cents,
which I'll charge to your wages."

There was a cot in the office, and a writing-desk, and in one corner a
small stock of woodsmen's furnishing goods: boots, hats, overalls, and
blanket-jackets, besides the gloves.

The boss locked the door behind us, and told me to follow him. He
carried a lantern, and lit the way to the stables.

Outside it was white and still, almost like a clear, quiet night in the
snows of midwinter; for a heavy frost covered everything, and in the
thin, unmoving air you could almost hear the crackling formation of
frost-crystals. Into the darkness of the forest the stars shone with
greater glory, and Orion was just sinking beyond the western mountain.

The four or five teamsters and Old Man Toler and I had gathered in
front of the stable, where the bark-wagons stood in the open. These
were strong vehicles, each with four massive wheels, and they supported
wide-spreading frames within which three or more cords of bark could be
loaded.

We "greased" the wagons by lantern-light, and then "hooked up" the
horses. The wagon in the van was driven by "Black Bob." Fitz-Adams
ordered Old Man Toler and me to go with that teamster and help him get
on a load of bark.

Black Bob, muffled to the eyes in a long ulster which was bound about
his waist with a piece of rope, stood erect on the loose boards that
formed the floor of his wagon, and gathered up the reins, and then
started his horses with a ringing oath. Old Man Toler and I followed
after, on foot, up a rocky road that had been newly cut to a point on
the mountain where strips of hemlock-bark lay piled like cord-wood.

Black Bob swayed to the jolting of the wagon, but kept his balance
with the ease of long habit, and swore a running accompaniment to the
tugging of his team. He was the tallest man in the camp, almost a giant
in height and in proportional development, and he owed his name to his
blue-black hair and swarthy complexion. He was a native-born American,
and, although he seemed never to discriminate among the other men on
grounds of nationality, I thought that some of them did not like him
because of a certain domineering manner he had.

He drew up now beside a pile of bark, and Toler and I placed a large
stone under each hind wheel to relieve the pull on the horses.

It had been growing light as we climbed the mountain, and now we could
see the sunlight on the topmost trees across the ravine.

Toler took up a position facing the bark-pile, with his back to the
wagon. He began to pass swiftly the pieces of bark over his head and
into the rigging, where Black Bob stood ready to load. I followed
Toler's example, imitating his movements as closely as I could, but
was painfully aware of my awkwardness.

We had been but a few minutes at work when the boss came driving up
behind us; as he turned out in order to pass, he called to me to come
with him, and lend a hand at loading.

I had an uncomfortable premonition of the ordeal before me; why, I do
not know, for the boss had treated me civilly so far; but I greatly
wished to stay in the camp, and I much feared discharge.

The boss drove on for some distance, then branched off on a side-road,
and having passed a number of bark-piles, finally turned around with
great difficulty, and drew up, as Black Bob had done, beside a cord of
bark.

I hastened to place a stone under a hind wheel, and then threw off my
coat, and, getting in between the wagon and the pile, I began to pass
the bark over my head, as I had learned to do from Toler.

The boss stood on the bottom of the rig, accepting listlessly the bark
as I passed it, and tossing it carelessly into place. His whole manner
was meant to convey to me the idea of my own inefficiency, as though he
was ready to work, even anxious to get warmed up in the frosty air,
but my part was so slowly done that his own was reduced to child's play.

The storm brewed for a time in grim silence, but soon it broke into
angry shouts of "Faster, faster, damn you!" and then the entire gamut
of insults and excommunications.

I had been cursed at West Point, though in terms less hard to bear; and
in expectation of the worst, I thought that I had schooled myself to
take it philosophically when it came. But I had an awful moment now,
for philosophy was clean gone, and in its place was a swift, mad desire
to kill; and as the hot blood rushed to my brain, and tingled in my
finger-tips, all that I could see for the instant were the handy stones
under my feet, and the close range of Fitz-Adams's head.

I do not know what it was that saved me, unless it was the sight of
Fitz-Adams flushed with the anger into which he lashed himself, and
becoming the more ludicrously impotent in his rage, as I restrained
my temper, and showed no sign of fear. Why he did not discharge me on
the spot I do not know. With awful imprecations he kept urging me to
faster and yet faster work. I quickened my clumsy pace to the swiftest
that I could maintain with efficiency, and held it there, careless of
his curses; and, exhausted as I was, I yet had the satisfaction at the
last of noting that our load was on as quickly as was Black Bob's.

And Fitz-Adams, too, found a curious balm for his troubled feelings.
We were at the last cord, and he was cursing hard, while I panted and
sweated in my straining efforts to pass the bark aboard. The strips
were large and heavy, some of them, and they all lay rough side up;
and as you lifted them over your head there fell upon you from each a
shower of dust and dirt that had gathered in the crumbling outer bark.
This filled your ears and hair, and found its way far down your back. I
had blocked the wheel, but we were on a sharp descent, and the load was
growing heavy. Evidently Fitz-Adams feared our breaking loose, and so
he stopped me suddenly with an order to "make fast the lock-break." Now
"the lock-break" conveyed the dimmest notion to my mind, and the boss
would give no hint as to what it really was nor how it was to be "made
fast;" instead, he stood and watched me, while, with awkward guesses as
to its purpose, I succeeded in unhooking one end of a heavy chain that
hung under the wagon, and having passed it between two spokes of a hind
wheel, I clumsily made fast the hook in a link of the chain drawn taut.

Fitz-Adams stood, meanwhile, in speechless anger, enraged beyond relief
from oaths; and then the tension broke, with comical effect, in a
sentence which seemed to come to him as a happy inspiration:

"I'm damned, Buddy, if you ain't greener than a green Irishman;
_greener than a green Irishman_." He repeated the phrase as though it
exactly met the case, and brought him satisfaction far beyond the power
of profanity; and then he shouted through the forest:

"Hey, Bob!"

"Hello!"

"This Buddy, he's greener than a green Irishman!" and he laughed aloud,
and there came an answering laugh from Bob; and the boss started down
the mountain with his load, the locked wheel bounding and crunching
among the stones, while he swore to steady the horses.

That was all of the loading for the morning, so Toler and I joined
company. Toler had in charge the cutting of roads to the bark-piles,
and I was to serve with him.

The piles were, some of them, in most inaccessible places. The
hemlock-trees on that side of the mountain had first been felled, then
the bark was cut round on the trunks at intervals of four feet. Next
the bark was peeled off and carefully heaped near by, while the trees
themselves were trimmed and then sawed into logs of desired lengths,
and these were "skidded" into piles. From the piles, in the spring,
when the streams are high, the logs are sent by "skid ways" into the
run, and, once in the water, the lumbermen use their finest skill in
floating them to the market at Williamsport.

In the meanwhile the bark must be got out and carted to the tannery,
and Toler and I had our work laid out in cutting ways for the wagons.

Supplied each with an axe, a cant-hook, and a grabbing-hoe, we began
the work of cutting through the brushwood and clearing away the stumps,
and laying rough bridges over the small streams.

I was delighted at my good fortune in being set to work under Toler.
My respect for him grew steadily. An experience of nearly forty years
as a woodsman had developed his natural gifts to the point of highest
skill, and he had a marvellous instinct for directing a course through
the maze of tangled undergrowth and logs and stumps which marked
the ruins of the forest. I was soon lost, but he turned hither and
thither, with the ready familiarity of a gamin to whom there are no
intricacies in the East End. He had the inspiring air of knowing what
he was about, and the less common possession of actual knowledge, and
he did his work in a masterly manner. "A workman that needeth not to
be ashamed" constantly recurred to me as a phrase which aptly fitted
him. And besides being a clever woodsman, Toler was clean of speech,
that is, comparatively clean of speech--he swore, but his oaths were
conventional and not usually of the blood-congealing kind of some of
the other men.

That was a long morning's work, from earliest dawn until noon, and the
ultimate advent of the dinner-hour was hugely welcome. Toler and I
knocked off work at the sound of the noon whistle at the tannery four
or five miles away. Only a few of us gathered at the camp. Fitz-Adams,
with the other teamsters, and "Sam the Book-keeper," who is also the
camp carpenter, and Toler and I made up the number. The rest of the
crew were too far in the mountains to return at midday, and "Tim the
Blacksmith" drove off in the buckboard with a hot dinner for them.

The first work of the afternoon was to help the teamsters get on a
second load of bark. Again the boss forced me to his aid, and cursed
me as he had done before, only I thought that he had been drinking,
and there was certainly an added viciousness in his oaths, and in the
threats of sudden death. But I had the consolation now of knowing that,
as soon as the load was on, I should work with Toler for the rest of
the day. Toler did not curse me, although it was impossible for him
to wholly conceal the slender regard in which he held a man who never
before had seen a grubbing-hoe, nor a cant-hook, and who handled an axe
about as effectively as a girl throws a stone, and to whom the woods
were a hopeless labyrinth. But Toler had the instincts of a gentleman;
for all his want of respect for a man so ignorant as I, it was clear
that there was not a little patient compassion in the feeling which he
bore me, and he was at pains to teach me, and he eagerly encouraged any
sign of improvement on my part.

But this time I was not done with Fitz-Adams when the afternoon's load
was on. Toler and I soon needed a crowbar, and he sent me to fetch one
from the blacksmith's shop.

Near the shop there is a depression in the road, and there the soil is
somewhat soft. Much noise was coming from that quarter; and as I neared
it I could see that Black Bob's wheels were fast in the mud, and that
the boss's load was drawn close up behind and blocked.

Black Bob was on the ground beside his team, his reins in hand, and
with frantic oaths he was urging his horses to their utmost strength.
Fitz-Adams stood by and watched; but at sight of the weakening brutes,
he quickly unbolted his own whiffle-trees, and driving his team ahead,
made fast to the tongue of Black Bob's wagon. Then both together they
started up their horses, lashing them with the far-reaching leather
thongs that swung from the short stocks which they carried, and joining
in a chorus of furious curses. Slowly the great wheels began to rise
from the deep grooves in which they had settled; but in another minute,
as the strength of the horses failed, the wheels sunk surely back
again. Fitz-Adams was beside himself with rage, and at that moment he
caught sight of me.

"What are you doing here?" he shouted with an oath.

"Toler sent me for a crowbar."

"He did, did he? Then I'll send you to hell!" and with that he seized
an axe which lay near, and swinging it above his head, he rushed at
me. It was a menacing figure that he made, with the axe held aloft by
his giant arms, his eyes flashing, and his nostrils dilating with the
childish passion which mastered him; but he was as harmless as a child
at any show of fearlessness, and there was the oddest anticlimax in his
mild command to "get that damn crowbar and hurry back to Toler," which
I was glad enough to do; for my part was a mere pretence of courage;
in reality I felt scared out of a year's growth, and my legs were
trembling violently.

Through the following days there was little variation for Toler and me
in the programme of work. We loaded bark until the teamsters were off,
and then cut ways to the piles.

There is, however, an incident of Tuesday morning which will linger in
my memory. It was the fulfilment of Dick the Kid's prophecy. I heard a
man swear.

The boss anticipated the usual time of the morning cursing, and gave me
an initial one that day in the dark in front of the stables, while the
teamsters stood by with their lanterns in hand, and listened critically
with sober faces, as though they were determining, with a nice sense of
the possible, whether Fitz-Adams was doing himself justice. At the last
he turned to them:

"Will I kill him now, or let him live one day more?"

"Let the damn dog live," came from Black Bob.

"Then you'll take him," said the boss, "and dray out that bar." So
Black Bob and I set off in company.

I was not a little perplexed by the puerility of Fitz-Adams's rage.
It seemed singularly out of keeping with the sturdy manliness of the
fellow. If he wished to get rid of me, why did he not discharge me? I
began to suspect that the cause lay in tenderness of heart, of which
he was secretly ashamed. To him I was _avis rara_ in a lumber-camp. No
doubt he thought me some hitherto unknown species of immigrant; and
being too tender-hearted to assume the responsibility of turning me
adrift, he hoped to frighten me away. Black Bob soon puzzled me almost
as much. He was driving the dray, which is a rude, low sledge, used
to draw out bark from points that are inaccessible to the wagons. We
were walking together at the side of the road, and neither of us spoke.
Presently Bob stopped his horses to give them breath, and then he
turned to me. His speech was halting, and there was an uncomfortable,
apologetic quality in his voice, but the feeling was evidently sincere.
To my surprise he was bidding me, with utmost kindness, not to mind
Fitz-Adams's curses, and he added that the boss meant nothing by
them, that he really knew no better. It seemed to me an act of truest
friendliness on Black Bob's part, involving charity and moral courage
of high order, and I was far more grateful than my acknowledgment
implied. It produced a comfortable elation, which lasted while we got
on a towering load of bark in silence in the earliest dawn, and started
for the road. We had almost reached it, and the horses were pulling
hard, when, with the suddenness of a pistol-shot, the dray came sharply
against the stump of a stubborn sapling that rose unseen in the way,
and in an instant the horses were plunging forward in broken harness,
and half the load was sliding gently to the ground.

Black Bob brought the horses to a stand, and then stood still himself.
I was filled with admiration for his self-control, for I dreamt that
he was making a successful effort to restrain himself. In reality he
was summoning all his powers; and in another moment, with face uplifted
to the pale stars, he broke forth in blasphemies so hellish, that for
the next full minute I might have been listening to the outcries of a
tormented fiend, held tight in the grip of remorseless agony.

Thursday morning brought the crisis in the history of my stay in camp.
In the course of the midday cursing of the day before, Fitz-Adams
told me that he was giving me my last chance. I tried hard to show my
fitness for the place, and our load was the first to start for the
tannery; but to all appearances Fitz-Adams was not placated. I thought
that the last hour of my stay in camp was surely come, and with a
heavy heart I began to plan the next move. But for some reason nothing
further was said to me about leaving, and Thursday morning found me
again helping the boss.

His mood had strangely changed; it was very early, and the skies were
overcast, and in the clouded twilight we could scarcely see to do our
work. Fitz-Adams seemed to be in no hurry; he was silent, and moved
nervously. I wondered what this might portend, and braced myself for
finality. It was very hard. I was learning to know the men; they
ignored me still, but I was sure that I understood them better, and my
liking for them grew each day, and earnestly I wished to stay, in the
hope of winning a footing in the camp, and some terms of fellowship
with the men.

Fitz-Adams had stopped working now, and he stood leaning on the rigging
as he spoke to me. There was a mildness in his tone and a tentative
expectancy, as though an uncomfortable suspicion had dawned upon him,
and he feared to verify it.

"Say, Buddy, have you ever been to school?"

"Yes," I said.

There was silence for a minute, and the tone in which Fitz-Adams broke
it was awestruck.

"Say, Buddy, have you got a education?"

"I've had good advantages."

And then eagerly from him:

"Major, can you figure?"

It was my inning now, and I liked it, and I was guilty of saying that,
within narrow limits, I could.

"Will you do my accounts for me, Major?"

"I will, with pleasure."

Fitz-Adams drew a deep breath, and his voice fell to a lower tone.

"Well, that'll be a good thing for me. I never had no schooling, and
Sam the Book-keeper, he don't seem to know much more'n me. I guess I
lost pretty nigh on to two thousand dollars on my contracts last year,
on account of not knowing how to figure. Say, Major, this is pretty
hard work for you; you suit yourself about this work, and help me with
the accounts. Of course, I--I--I--didn't know----"

"Oh, drop it, Fitz-Adams!" I said. "We understand each other. I'll be
glad to look after the accounts as long as I stay; but it's growing
light now, and let's get on this load."

And so I won a place in the camp, and got myself on human terms with
the boss. Fitz-Adams never referred to the matter again, but treated me
in a perfectly manly, straightforward way, taking patiently my clumsy
work as a woodsman, and accepting, as a matter of course, my help with
the accounts, and even consulting me, at times, in certain details
of the work. It was one of these consultations which brought a rare
opportunity.

I had won my way with the boss, not by virtue of an education, but
actually upon the basis of an acquaintance with elementary arithmetic.
When I came to look at the accounts, it was not a question of
book-keeping that was involved, but simple addition and multiplication
and division, in all of which branches both Fitz-Adams and Sam the
Book-keeper were lamentably weak, so weak, in fact, that they felt no
real confidence in their results.

But my way with the men was yet to make. They were not uncivil,
but they would none of me. To them I was still an outsider, "an
inharmonious figure in their club," and, whatever may have been the
change in my relations with the boss, the men were in no way bound to
recognize me.

One morning Fitz-Adams and I stood together in his rig, as he was
driving up the "corduroy road" to the place on the mountain where the
crew were at work. Presently he pointed out to me, about forty yards up
the steep ascent no our left, some long, straggling piles of bark that
perched there, like peasants' huts over a precipice in the Alps.

"I don't know how to go at that bark," he said with a frown. "You can't
get a wagon there, nor yet a dray; and it's so brittle that if you
slide it down, you'll have nothing but chips to cart to the tannery,
and the man that tries to carry it down--well, it's a three or four
days' job, and he'll have his neck broke sure."

I said that I would look at it. I was "piling bark" now on my own
account, and Toler had another "Buddy," a big, bouncing Irish Hercules,
who had lately come to camp, and who soon won distinction by reason of
the songs he sung. They were wonderful songs; long beyond belief, and
they told the loves and woes of truly wonderful people.

Buddy had early made known his talent, and on his first evening in camp
he was peremptorily told to sing. It was after supper. He was sitting,
much at home, on the bench behind the stove, and was smoking. Instantly
he took his pipe from his mouth, and cleared his throat; then, laying
his hands on his knees, he sang, swaying meanwhile in time with the
monotonous cadences of that strange verse, which went on and on and
on for quite half an hour, while the men listened open-eyed, and
punctuated the sentiment with profane approval.

When I examined the bark-piles I found that transferring them to the
"corduroy road" below was a matter of carrying the bark in small loads
on one's back, and of having a secure footing for the descent.

On the next morning I took a pick and spade, and first cut a series of
steps to the ledge where the bark lay piled. After a little practice, I
learned to make up a load, by selecting a broad, stout slab of bark and
packing the smaller pieces upon it. Then stooping under the load, as
it lay ready on the edge of a pile, I easily shifted it to my back and
head; and holding it with one hand, while the other was free to help
maintain my balance, I carefully picked a way down the steep decline.

It probably appeared a far more difficult and dangerous feat than
it really was; and with a load of bark upon my back, I was more
than ever an outlandish figure to the men, more in keeping with the
Königsstuhl and the valley of the Neckar than with Fitz-Adams's Camp in
the Alleghanies. But the actual accomplishment of the work seemed to
interest them, and the teamsters used to stop and watch me in silence,
and then drive off, swearing in low tones.

One evening the whole returning crew caught me at the job. The men
stood still, and having watched a descent, they examined the bark piled
high at the roadside, and then walked on, commenting among themselves.
That night in Camp several of them spoke to me, calling me "Major"
after Fitz-Adams's manner.

It was the beginning of more personal acquaintance with the men. I
can but like them. In the fortnight and more of my stay I cannot lay
claim to having got on intimate terms with them. But they seem to me a
truthful, high-spirited, hard-working, generous set of men. They swear
like fiends incarnate, and when they can, they drink, and they all have
"rogued and ranged in their time." On grounds of high morality there is
no possible justification for them. But these are men who were born and
bred to vicious living; and the wonder is not that they are bad, but
that in all their blasting departure from the good, there yet survives
in them the vital power of return.

There is Old Man Toler. He is certainly an exception in point of birth
and earliest breeding, but he has been in the lumber business more
or less, he tells me, since he was a boy of fourteen. There was one
important period taken out, when, as a young man, he enlisted, and
served in the Army of the Potomac, from the spring of 1862 until
the end of the Civil War. He is native-born, and has the intelligent
patriotism of a true American. In our walks together to and from our
work, I delighted in his talk about the war period in his life. His
perspective as a private soldier was so true, so thoroughly free from
the towering obtrusion of his own experiences. These were almost lost
in his absorbing interest in the working out of great events. He
knew the war thoroughly from the point of view of the army. He knew
the service, and had borne his part in hardship and in action with a
distinct sense of personal responsibility to the subject and aim of it
all. This was luminous in what he said, and never from his declaration
of it, but in the absence of such declaration, and in the loss of self
in the large action of which he felt himself a part.

There was much in Toler that rang true, and I regretted the more
that he evidently preferred to talk little about himself, and almost
never of his personal views. My wonder at his being a common hand
in camp grew, until one day, in talking with Black Bob, I learned a
reason. Black Bob, quite of his own accord, had instituted a series of
comparisons among the men.

"There's Fitz-Adams and his brother," he was saying, "they're about
as good a pair of lumbermen as you'll find. But they ain't the best in
this camp. There's a man here that knows more about this business than
any three other men, and that's Old Man Toler. His father was a big
lumberman before him, and Toler was brought up thorough to the work,
and he's had many a camp of his own, and made lots of money in his
time. But he ain't ever kept none, and he never will." And Black Bob
winked significantly, and ostentatiously wiped his mouth.

There is an "old soldier" of quite another type in camp. It is Sam the
Book-keeper. Work on the accounts has brought me into close relations
with Sam. He is a large, good-humored, fair-haired and ruddy-faced
American, who by no means shows his more than fifty years. It is
pathetic to watch his struggles with the lines of figures, as he tries
to add them up; and the situation is really serious, for almost never
can he get the same result twice.

He and I were working one evening in the office, and had straightened
matters out to a certain point. Sam was in high spirits as a result.
He wished to talk. There was a handy explanation of his ignorance of
figures, and he wanted me to know it. He chiefly played truant from
school, he said, when he was a boy at home on his father's farm; and
at the age of eleven he ran away for good, allured by the fascination
of life on a canal-boat; and ever since that time he had shifted for
himself.

And now Sam was fairly started in his history; but the narrative leaped
suddenly to his career as a soldier. His war experiences included the
battle of Bull Run and the capture of Savannah. Sam's knowledge of
campaigns was not exhaustive, and his most vivid memories of historic
events were all of a personal nature, which is certainly not unnatural.

From his own frank statement, he seems to have been among the first
to leave the field at Bull Run. With another member of his company he
reached Washington, rather worn and dusty, but really none the worse
for a cross-country sprint.

Once in the city, they were soon hailed by an acquaintance, who took
them in hand with the remark that "he knew just the thing for them."

They were simply to follow him to Pennsylvania Avenue, and obey his
directions. His first was that they should limp, and they limped; and
he led them, limping, to certain rooms on the avenue, where thoughtful
preparation had been made for the care of the wounded. Here they were
received with marked attention, and after having been asked as to
whether they were "just from the front," and to which regiment they
belonged, they were put in the care of certain volunteer nurses. These
ladies, with their own hands, bared the soldiers' feet, and washed
them, and then dressed them in clean socks and comfortable slippers,
which the men were to wear until quite well again. At this refuge Sam
and his companion, and many another soldier "from the front," were
given bed and board as long as they found it convenient to remain.

With cheerful appreciation of the humor of it, Sam described the
labored way in which his partner and he would limp down the avenue each
morning, until they had turned a corner; and then, instantly restored
to perfect soundness, they would make for the nearest saloon. They
played this game until their cash was gone; then they felt compelled to
rejoin their regiment, which was encamped near Arlington.

That was the beginning of Sam's career as a soldier. It ended at
Savannah. After the capture of the city, and as General Sherman's army
was setting out on the march to Richmond, Sam found himself one of a
squad ordered to remain behind, for the purpose of assisting the United
States Excise Officers.

The men had quarters in a large stone building, which was given over
entirely to their use. The work was much to their taste. Every day they
shrewdly searched the city for contraband liquor, and not infrequently
they unearthed a den where kegs of whiskey were concealed. Some of
these they always smuggled to their own quarters, and the rest they
handed over to the excise officers. Orgies that were fired with
unfailing rum consumed the greater part of every night, and formed an
epoch in Sam's history upon which he reflects with lasting satisfaction.

Most of the men in camp are younger than Old Man Toler and Sam the
Book-keeper, and of the younger set I have made the acquaintance
of "Long-nosed Harry." Harry is barely thirty and already a man of
considerable experience. When fairly started, he can tell capital tales
of how he has "beat his way" on long journeys through the country, and
of narrow escapes from the "cops," and of other occasions when he has
not escaped. Wherever in this country the railways have penetrated,
Harry seems to have gone, and he has gathered on his wanderings a fund
of curious information, as though there were a nether side of things,
and he had grown familiar with that in contrast with the surface that
is exposed to the eye of the ordinary traveller.

Harry's face confirms his account of a career not unfamiliar with
the police. A long thin face it is, with small dark eyes set close
together, a narrow, thin-lipped mouth, a receding chin, and an
abnormally long nose, which has gained nothing in point of beauty by
having been broken in a fight with a negro at Atlantic City.

He is of glib speech, and he has at command a long repertory of songs
of the vaudeville variety, and this enhances his standing among the
men. Besides, Harry can read aloud, as I learned one day when a stray
newspaper found its way into the camp. He read with a certain swift
readiness that held your interest, and you soon grew excited in an
effort to recognize old acquaintances in the strangely accented longer
words, which were plainly unintelligible to Harry and his hearers,
while yet the general sense of what was read was obviously clear.

Harry and I sat talking together one Sunday evening. We had a corner
of the lobby to ourselves. Suddenly, without apparent connection with
what we had been saying, he gave me one of those rare confidences
which reveal, as by a flash of supernatural light, the very heart of a
man's life, and then leave you awed and speechless, in the presence of
eternal verities.

It was a fragment of personal history, very short, and it was told
with the directness and simplicity of truth itself. He had been married
six years before. His wife was a delicate girl who lived for only two
years after Harry married her. He was a brakeman on a freight-train
then. He used to look forward to his "off-day" with a feeling, he said,
that "made life worth living." And they were convenient, too, those
"off-days"; for in them he did the washing, and the scrubbing, and
whatever else of accumulated housework he could spare his wife. But she
died. And there was nothing more in life for Harry; so he drifted back
into the old way, the way of all the men, a life of alternate work and
debauch.

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

"Karl the Swede" is the only Scandinavian in the crew, which, like
the other gangs of workmen which I have known, is exceedingly
heterogeneous in character. There is nothing remarkable about Karl.
He is a fair-haired, blue-eyed, stocky youth of one-and-twenty, and
as hard-drinking, hard-working a woodsman as any of them. But Karl
happens to be the only man who, during my stay in camp, has met with
an accident. It was yesterday morning. The men were trimming logs,
and "skidding" them at a point on the mountain a mile or more from
camp, and I was piling bark not far from the "skid-ways." At a little
before noon I heard the buckboard go jolting over the bowlders on the
mountain-road; and a few minutes later there rang through the forest
Fitz-Adams's call to dinner.

I set out for the nearest skid-way, where the men were gathering, when
suddenly I came upon Karl lying at length in a clump of myrtle, with
one foot extended upon a rock, and bare, except for a woollen sock that
was bound tightly around the instep. What had happened was clear in an
instant. The sock was saturated with blood, and a dark, clotted stream
stained the foot, and a pool of blood had formed on the surface of the
rock. I sat down beside him, and Karl first showed me in his boot a
clean cut three inches long, where the axe-blade had entered. Then he
unwrapped the sock, and lifting from the wound a quid of pulpy tobacco,
he exposed a gash where the skin and shallow flesh lay open to the
bone. The flow of blood had nearly ceased, for the tobacco had acted
as a styptic; and Karl quickly reapplied it, and again bound the wound
tightly with his sock.

All the while he acted in a perfectly impersonal manner, as though he
were in no way directly concerned in the accident, which was simply
a phenomenon of common interest to us both. He betrayed no trace
of suffering nor even of annoyance at the discomfort of the mishap;
and soon he began to speak of it, in his broken English, with like
impersonality.

"Fitz-Adams, you know, would take him to camp in the buckboard after
dinner, and would see that he got safe to English Centre, where the
doctor would dress the wound. That would do very well until he reached
Williamsport; but he must go to Williamsport, and that was the worst of
it; for it would be several weeks before he could get back to camp, and
then, between drunks and the doctor's bills, his savings would be all
gone."

This taken-for-granted attitude toward riotous living is strikingly
characteristic. I have noticed it repeatedly among the men. They
speak of past and prospective debauches with the _naïveté_ of callow
undergraduates, except that among the lumbermen there is no sense of
credit or distinction attaching to vice; it is simply inherent in the
order of things. This is by no means a professed creed. Profession,
when there is any, is all in the other direction, and is of the nature
of the "homage that vice pays to virtue." It is simply in the natural
and unpremeditated speech and action of the men that you detect this
attitude of mind.

The time spent at the camp is, in one aspect of it, a course of
training, a cumulative storage of energy, financial and physical,
against a future expenditure in the sudden outburst of a grand carouse.

It has been interesting to notice what have appeared to be the
instinctive precautions of the men. There seems to be an established
custom of great strength that prohibits the keeping of spirits in
camp. And gambling is strangely infrequent. I have heard hints of
memorable epochs, when, like an epidemic, gambling has swept the camp
with fearful force, and there is a wholesome fear of its return. I
was struck with this one night, when, without apparent warning, the
customary "High, Low, Jack and the Game" gave place to poker, and an
excited crowd stood round the table and watched; and Fitz-Adams had to
go up to the office to bring down wages due to the players. But the
outbreak spent itself without becoming epidemic this time, and you
could feel the relief among the men when "Phil the Farmer" and "Irish
Mike" agreed to stand their loss of about ten dollars each, and not
continue the game.

"High, Low, Jack" is invariable after supper, and lends itself with
singular sociability to the pleasure of the men. There is but one pack
of cards, and only one table in the lobby. A four-handed game is begun
immediately after supper, the opposite men playing partners. A game is
not long; and at its end the beaten partners give place to a new pair,
and this course continues until all the members of the crew have had a
hand.

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

In looking over this chapter I see that I have drawn a very inadequate
picture of Fitz-Adams. A hard swearer he certainly is, but Black Bob
was right in assuring me that there is more ignorance than malice in
his habitual maledictions.

First of all, Fitz-Adams is an admirable workman. To any department of
the work of lumbermen he can lend a hand of highest efficiency. And
his, in a marked degree, are the manual skill and resourceful ingenuity
which are characteristic of the men. Only Fitz-Adams is exceptional in
these particulars, like Old Man Toler. With them this manual skill, for
instance, is like the sure touch of a master handicraftsman.

One morning, while at work with Old Man Toler, I openly admired his
handling of an axe. Toler was standing on a log which obstructed our
way, and which he was about to cut in two. He drew the axe-blade up the
side of the log between his feet. "Do you see that scratch?" he said,
and then he swung the axe above his head, and brought it down with a
sweeping stroke. The blade entered the bark exactly where the scratch
had been. Five times running, Toler performed this feat, never missing
his mark by the fraction of an inch, and then he turned to me. "I've
used an axe so long, Buddy," he said, "that I can split hairs with a
good one now."

But even more than a thorough woodsman, Fitz-Adams is a superb
overseer. Under his shrewd foresight and direction, the whole work of
the crew is urged forward with resistless energy. He knows exactly what
each man is doing, and whether or not the work is well done.

His planning of the work and his effective organizing and directing
toward its accomplishment are, no doubt, his strongest points; but
dramatically considered, although he is perfectly unconscious of the
effect, he shows to greatest advantage when he is personally leading
the crew in an attack upon a difficult situation. All his powers are
well in evidence then, and not least of all his power of speech. You
have actual sight at such times of one of Carlyle's heroes, a "captain
of industry," to whom there are no insurmountable difficulties, no
"impossibilities," but who brings order out of chaos, by the sheer
force of indomitable energy.

With this high efficiency his ignorance is in striking contrast. He
can write his name, and there his educational equipment ends. His
helplessness in the presence of figures is as pathetic and quite as
serious as is Sam the Book-keeper's. But Fitz-Adams is a young man,
barely thirty, I should say. Almost his earliest memory is that of
being a mule-driver in one of the mines near Wilkesbarre. From this he
went to picking slate in a breaker. Now he is a jobber, employing a
large crew, and undertaking contracts which involve considerable sums
of money. There has been offered to him, and it is still open, the
position of overseer in a far larger enterprise than his own, where,
personally, he would run none of the business risk; but he has confided
to me that he does not dare to accept the place owing to his lack of
even elementary education. In this connection he once asked me whether
I thought that he might yet go to school. I did think so with emphasis,
and I gave him so many reasons for this opinion, and cited so many
examples of men as old as he and older who were at school, that he
really warmed to it as a practicable plan.

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

The rain stopped hours ago, and it is turning very cold, and snow has
begun to fall. Fitz-Adams got back from English Centre long before
dinner, and there is evidence that he has not been drinking. I have
consulted him on the matter of leaving, and he has urged me to stay,
and has offered me permanent employment; but he says that, if I must
be off, and am bent on going westward, I would better get as far as
Hoytville as soon as possible, else I may run the risk of encountering
roads blocked with snow. Then, for the first time, he introduced the
subject of wages, and asked me what I thought was "right." I said that
before coming to the camp, I had worked for a farmer, and had been
given seventy-five cents a day and my keep; and I added that, if this
rate of wage seemed fair to him, it would suit me perfectly. He agreed
at once, and now I am a capitalist. Soon I shall set out for Hoytville,
which is, I judge, a matter of two or three hours' walk from here.
Fitz-Adams has given me careful directions about the road, and has
shown the deepest interest in my plan of getting West, and has urged
me to write to him.

The crew are all gone to work, and I shall not see them. They were off
as soon as the storm slackened. All were keen to go, and so be spared
the misery of a day of enforced idleness, all except "Old Pete," and he
is past being keen. He is over sixty, and has a strongly marked Celtic
face, deeply furrowed with the lines of age and pain. He works with
the crew, but in camp he sits alone on the bench opposite the stove,
with the overalls and shirts hanging over him. When not at work he sits
there hour after hour, his large, muscular frame bent forward, and his
elbows resting on his knees, and there he endures, in the dumb agony of
animal pain, the torment of rheumatism in his legs. He seldom speaks,
and never of his sufferings--only sometimes in comically sententious
response to something that has interested him. And the men let him
alone, knowing by a true intuition that he prefers it so.

After the rain let up I happened to pass through the lobby as the men
were starting for their work. Old Pete was the last to move. I watched
him rising slowly to his feet. In spite of him, his face drew the
picture of the hideous pain he bore, but through it shone the clear
courage of a man, and his eyes reflected the grim humor of a thought
that touched his native sense, and he smiled as he said:

"We don't have to work; we can starve."

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

I have spent three Sundays in the woods. On the first I fled cravenly
into the forest, hugging a book from out my pack, and the hours flew
swiftly along the pages. The second Sunday was another glorious autumn
day. By that time I had won a modest place in camp, and could hold up
my head with due respect among the men. I asked several of them whether
there was any church service at English Centre. They thought that there
was, but they would take no stock at all in my plan of discovery.

Alone I set out for the village. There was perfect quiet in the
mountains, no sound of axe or saw, nor crash of falling trees, nor
rumble of bark-wagons; only the tuneful flow and splash of the run,
which caught the living sunlight, and flashed it back in radiance
through the flushing air, that quivered in the ecstasy of buoyant
life. The fire of life flamed in the glowing hues of autumn, and
burned with white heat in the hoar-frost which clung to the shaded
crevices in the rocks, and along the blades of seared grass, and on the
fringe of fallen leaves. And I was free, as free and careless as the
mountain-stream, and before me was a blessed day of rest!

Every foot of the road was strangely familiar, but the familiarity
lay in an intimate association with some distant past, as of earliest
childhood. There was the camp by the dam, and there the Irishman's
cabin, where the cow was still munching straw, and the sow wallowing
in the mire. Then I came to the fork in the road, where one way led to
Wolf's Run. It was a lifetime since I had gone up that way, feeling as
cocky as a wedding-guest, and soon had come down again "a sadder and
a wiser man." I felt like another Rip Van Winkle as I re-entered the
village, but the marvel lay in there being no change at all, except in
the Sunday calm which now possessed the place.

The post-office is in a private house, and I knocked in some
uncertainty of being able to get my letters; but the postmistress gave
them to me with obliging readiness, and with them a cordial invitation
to attend the Sunday-school, which, she said, was the only service of
that morning. Her invitation was more welcome than she knew, for it was
the first of its kind to reach me as a proletaire.

I read my letters, and then went to the church, which stands at the end
of the village street. The service was beginning. As superintendent
the postmistress was in charge. There were no men present. About thirty
women and girls, and half a dozen boys, made up the school. The conduct
of the service I thought intensely interesting. The superintendent was
entirely at home in her place, and she valued the opportunity.

When the classes grouped themselves for the study of the lesson, a
teacher was lacking. I was asked to take the place, and was startled
at finding myself in charge of a class of village belles. What their
feeling toward the arrangement was, I could only guess; but it was
clear that they were not accustomed to being taught by an unshaven,
unshorn woodsman, in rough clothes, and boots covered with patches. But
the lesson was in my favor; it was the incident of the washing of the
disciples' feet at the last Passover. I soon forgot my embarrassment in
the interest of the text, and in an atmosphere of serious study.

Last Sunday I went again to the Sunday-school, and I had my former
class to teach. Some preparation had been possible during the week,
and the hour passed successfully. Among the announcements was one of a
prayer-meeting to be held that night.

I reached the church at the hour of the evening service. I opened the
door, and there sat a crowded congregation in waiting. The back seats
on both sides of the aisle were solid ranks of men, lumbermen, and
teamsters, and tannery hands, many of them in their working-clothes.
There were women and children scattered through the pews farther up,
and some boys had overflowed upon the pulpit steps, but most of the
company were men.

There was no one in the minister's seat, but the postmistress was in
place at the organ, and as I entered, she nodded to me in evident
expectation of my joining her. I walked forward, and she stepped out
into the aisle to meet me.

"It's time to begin," she said, quietly.

"Is your minister not come yet?" I asked.

"Oh, you're going to speak to-night, you know."

I did not know. For an instant I knew only that there was a cold,
hard grip upon my heart which seemed to hold it still, and that in my
brain there had begun a mad dance of all that I ever thought I knew.
But from out the turmoil a sane thought emerged: "This is a company
of working-people who are come to hear a fellow-workman speak to them
about our deepest needs." In another moment I was cooler, and a
strange, unreasoning peace ensued.

I asked the postmistress to select some hymns. She handed me a list,
chosen with perfect knowledge of those which the congregation most
enjoyed. The people were soon singing, thinly at first; but the
familiar melody spread, and carried with it a sense of solidarity,
in which self was merged and lost, and the swelling sound rolled on,
deepening with the voices of the men. Soon it recalled college-chapel,
with the students in a mood to sing, and "Ein' Feste Burg" mounting in
the majesty of that deep-toned hymn, until the vaulted ceilings rock,
and the archangels above the chancel seem to join in the splendid
volume of high praise!

But more helpful to me than the singing was the sight of familiar
faces. Black Bob stood towering like another Saul above the mass of
men; and at his side was one of our teamsters who lives in the village,
and with whom I had often loaded bark. Near the door--I was not quite
sure at first, but there could be no mistake--near the door was
Fitz-Adams, and not far from him Long-nosed Harry and Phil the Farmer
stood together.

I was trembling when I began to speak, trembling with awful fear, a
fear that was yet a solemn joy; for I had vision then of human hearts
hungering to be fed, and, as a sharer in their need, I knew that it was
given to me to point them to the Bread of Life.

I could speak to them now, for with greater clearness I could see these
fellow-workers as they were--strong, brave men who win the mastery
which comes to those who clear the way for progress, giving play, in
their natural living, to the forces which make men free, and growing
strong in heart and in the will to do, as they grow strong of arm and
catch the rough cunning of their trade; men of many races, yet meeting
on the common ground of men all free and under equal chance to make
their way; knowing no differences but those of personality, and winning
their places in the crew, each man according to his kind, and his
rewards according to his skill.

Such were they in their outward lives, the physical life within them
growing in living ways, and making them the true, efficient workmen
that they were. But of the inner life that makes us men, that life
wherein we act from choice, and must "give account of the deeds done in
the body," that range of action which we call moral, where conscience
speaks to us in words of command, there they knew no mastery at all,
and, least of all, the mastery of the moralist.

To them God was a moral ruler, dwelling afar from the daily life
of men, and righteousness was a slavish obedience to His laws, and
religion a mystic somewhat which was good for women and children and
weak men.

And yet deep in their own hearts was their supremest need. Life as they
knew it brought to them no satisfaction for its craving want. It was
not so in other things; they knew their work; and in the overcoming
of its difficulties, they had felt the fierce joy of conquest. But
confronted with temptations, the difficulties of their inner life,
there they had no strength; and lust and passion mastered them, and
left their real desire unsatisfied. Here, in respect of mastery, they
were slaves, and as regards life, they were dead, having only the need
of life.

There, then, was their want; it was for Life, abundant, victorious Life.

And now I could speak to them of God; of Him "who is not far from every
one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being;" the
living God who reveals Himself in all life, and who became incarnate in
the Son of Man, and who speaks to us in human words which go straight
to our seeking hearts: "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
"I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more
abundantly." "The words that I speak unto you, they are life."

"Strong Son of God!" whose living words quicken us from the death of
sin and set us free. By whose grace we are "renewed in the whole man
after His image, and enabled, more and more, to die unto sin and live
unto righteousness." Who was "made sin for us, who knew no sin; that
we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." "Who His own self
bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sin,
should live unto righteousness." Whose death was not a reconcilement of
God to us, but was "God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself."
Whose Gospel is the glad tidings of this reconciliation, and we are
become "ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we
pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God."

And then we prayed, confessing our sinful state, our bondage, our death
in sin, and pleading that we might be "transformed by the renewing of
our minds, that we might prove what is that good, and acceptable, and
perfect will of God."

     *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Now that I am on the eve of leaving Fitz-Adams's Camp, I cannot hide
from myself my eagerness to go. I have real regrets; for while two
weeks and as many days do not constitute a long period, yet time is
purely relative, and I shall have a livelier memory of the camp and
of certain of the men, and a keener interest in them, than I have for
places and men with whom my association has been much longer.

But of the feelings of which I am conscious at leaving, I am surprised
at the intensity of the longing to know what has happened during the
three weeks, nearly, since I have seen a newspaper from the great
world. I thought little of it as the days passed, but now I am all
aglow with desire for news about the progress of the campaigns in New
York and Massachusetts and Ohio. And then the last word from abroad
had piqued one's curiosity to the utmost as to possible results. Mr.
Smith, the leader of the House of Commons, I know is dead; and as I was
leaving Williamsport for the woods, I saw upon the bulletin-boards the
announcement of Mr. Parnell's sudden death; but of the political effect
of these events no word has reached me. Has Mr. Balfour or Mr. Goschen
succeeded to the leadership of the House? And if Mr. Balfour became the
First Lord of the Treasury, does he retain the Chief Secretaryship
for Ireland? And has the death of Mr. Parnell brought about a reunion
between Parnellites and. M'Carthyites, or is the breach as hopeless as
ever?

It will be intensely interesting to find answers to these questions and
to many more; but after all I am sincerely sorry to leave the camp,
and as I go up now to say good-by to Fitz-Adams, who is in his office,
it is with the knowledge that I am parting from a man whom it is an
inspiration to have known.




The Workers--The East

By WALTER A. WYCKOFF

With five full-page Illustrations. 270 pp. 12mo, $1.25

     _CONTENTS:--The Adjustment--A Day-Laborer at West Point--A Hotel
     Porter--A Hired Man at an Asylum--A Farm Hand--In a Logging Camp._

In this first volume of a college man's narrative of his two years'
experience as a day-laborer, he deals entirely with rural occupations
and rural conditions. He is a day-laborer in an uncrowded market.
He is in close contact with poverty, but not with despair. This is
a side of the labor question which has been very much neglected by
sociologists, and it forms an invaluable introduction to the more
strenuous conditions of the second volume. Professor Wyckoff writes
with the literary skill of a novelist, and the scrupulous accuracy of a
scientist.

     "We doubt if any American of the employer class can read it
     without a feeling that the picture tells a story of the whole
     civilization in which he lives. It is a thoroughly American book,
     and could have been written in no other country."--_The Evening
     Post_, New York.

     "The volume is packed with living faces; they are there in the air
     before one in all their delightful homely individuality, their
     recognizable truth to human nature."--_The Weekly Sun_, London.

     "This writer at least brings our fellows of the ditch and the
     woods closer to our sympathies."--_The Dial_, Chicago.

     "The project itself was a brave one and bravely carried
     out."--_The Observer_, New York.

     "The valuable features of the book are the observations of Mr.
     Wyckoff on the habits of working men, their genuine democracy and
     the sore temptations which are offered by the saloon to men who
     have not formed the reading habit, and who have no resources for
     amusement."--_The Chronicle_, San Francisco.

     "We regard it as much the most enlightening as well as
     incomparably the most interesting sociological work of the
     year."--_The Outlook_, New York.

     "It is doubtful if a more interesting contribution to social
     science than this work of Professor Wyckoff's has ever been
     written."--_The Interior_, Chicago.




The Workers--The West

By WALTER A. WYCKOFF

With 32 full-page Illustrations by W. R. Leigh 12mo, $1.50

     _CONTENTS:--In the Army of the Unemployed (Chicago)--A Factory
     Hand--Among the Revolutionaries--A Road-Builder of the World's
     Fair Grounds--From Chicago to Denver--A Burro Puncher on the
     Plains._

In this volume Mr. Wyckoff continues his "experiment in reality" in the
crowded labor-market of Chicago. He suffers with the lowest classes of
the unemployed, and works himself to a better condition; he studies
organized labor in a great factory; he analyzes social discontent with
the anarchists; and he works his way to the Pacific coast through the
great wheat farms, toils in deep mines, and drives a burro across the
desolate plains. This closes one of the most romantic narratives ever
written by a scholar, and one of the most valuable to all classes. It
is a contribution to the study of humanity.

     "Nobody could read the present instalment of 'The Workers' in the
     West without feeling as never before the reality of the suffering
     which night after night and day after day, faces thousands upon
     thousands of homeless, hopeless working men in the great cities of
     our 'prosperous' country."--_The Commons_, Chicago.

     "The story is Dantesque in its realism, for it is the realest
     of the horrible real that it tells of."--_The City and State_,
     Philadelphia.

     "Mr. Leigh's illustrations could not be improved; they are simply
     perfect. We believe the American public is following Mr. Wyckoff's
     papers with intense interest, for they get right down to life
     as no previous study of this kind has done."--_The Homestead_,
     Springfield, Mass.

     "These are unique sociological studies, in the nature of what may
     be called laboratory work."--_The Watchman_, Boston.

     "His 'experiment' is a vitally interesting one--a young college
     graduate, he is trying to see what are the chances for an
     honest, strong man to earn his living."--_The National Tribune_,
     Washington.

     "This is so vividly written that one's heart aches for the
     miserable creatures it describes."--_The Irrigation Age_, Chicago.

     "These articles will make every reader think of the
     working-classes with new and painful interest."--_The Bulletin_,
     Pittsburg, Pa.

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers
NEW YORK