The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Workers, by Walter A. (Walter Augustus) Wyckoff

THE WORKERS

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

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.

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.

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.