A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM
WILKESBARRE, PENNSYLVANIA,
Saturday, September 19, 1891.
I have a wide sweep of country to cover from the "---- House" in
the Highlands above the Hudson, where I served as a porter, and
received with my wages a reference to the effect that my work was done
"faithfully and well," to the coal regions of Pennsylvania in the
valley of the Susquehanna.
My spirits rise at every recollection of the journey. For days I walked
through the crisp autumn air, breathing its tingling freshness, and
barely sensible of fatigue.
The way led me over the rich farm-lands of Orange County, and across
the Delaware, and through the lonely wilderness of the Pennsylvania
border, until I emerged upon the hills above the Susquehanna, and
caught sight of the splendid valley, with its native beauty hideously
marred by the blackened trails of forest fires and the monstrous heaps
of culm that mark the mouth of the coal-pits.
So far work has not failed me, unless I mark as an exception the single
case when I began a search, and brought it abruptly to an end by
descending suddenly upon a camping party of friends.
Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other servants, I appeared
among them at the "---- House," and with as little notice I tried to
steal away. Instead of going to the kitchen at five o'clock on that
Wednesday morning for scrubbing-water, I took to the road with my pack,
and left behind me the "---- House" awaking to life in the servants'
quarters.
I had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, and now I wondered what
my next rôle was to be. But the feeling was simply a genial curiosity,
and was free from the timid shrinking with which I set out from the
minister's house in Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls. Then
it was under the spur of self-compulsion that I launched afresh upon
this fortuitous life. With strong animal instinct I had clung to any
haven where shelter and food were secure. Now I warmly welcomed a freer
courage born of experience. Not too sure of newly gained powers, but
like a boy learning to swim, I fancied that I felt the strength of
some confidence in the novel element. Light-hearted in spite of my
pack, which gained weight with every step, I walked briskly along the
country roads, charmed with everything I saw, and feeling sure that my
wages would see me through to another job. Was it a real acquisition,
and had I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this fugitive life?
or did the difference lie in the bracing cool of the morning, and
the beauty of the open country, and the sense of freedom after long
restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that little, hoarded balance in
my purse?
It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, and too late to look for
work. With my eye upon the rows of cottages which line the street by
which I entered the town, I soon found a boarding-house for workmen.
A bed could be had for twenty cents. At a bakery near by I got a loaf
of bread and a quart of milk for a dime, and was thus supplied with a
supper and breakfast. Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell to me that
night, and in the cool of a threatening morning I set out to find work.
The scaffolding about a brick building in process of erection drew
my attention, and I applied for a job as a hod-carrier, but found no
demand there for further unskilled labor. The boss in charge refused
me with some show of petulance, as though annoyed by repeated appeals.
He was not more cheerful, but was politely communicative enough when I
asked after the likelihood of my finding work in the town. "There is
no business doing," he said. "The bottom has fallen out of this place.
There's two men looking for every job here, and my advice to you is to
go somewhere else."
At the head of the street I came upon the foundation work of another
building, which, I learned, was to be an armory. Here the boss
instantly offered me a job, if I could lay brick or do the work of a
mason, but of unskilled labor he said that he had an abundant supply.
"But yonder," he added, "is the Asylum, and much work is in progress on
the grounds, and there, surely, is your best chance of employment."
The Asylum was a State Homœopathic Institution for the Insane. I could
see the large brick buildings on the highest area of spacious grounds,
which spread away in easy undulations, with their natural beauty
heightened by the tasteful work of a landscape gardener.
Near the entrance to the grounds I came upon a large force of laborers
digging a ditch for a water-main. The boss refused me a place, but
not without evident regret at the necessity, and he was at pains to
explain to me that, already on that morning, he had been obliged to
turn away half a dozen men.
It was with no great expectation of success at finding work there
that I began walking somewhat aimlessly through the Asylum grounds.
The first person whom I met was an old Irish gardener. He painfully
stood erect as I questioned him as to whom I should apply for a job,
and supported himself with one hand on my shoulder, while he told me
of the medical superintendent, and the overseer, and the foreman, who
are in charge of various departments of the work. Presently, his face
brightened with excitement as he pointed to a large man who was walking
toward one of the buildings, and he pushed me in his direction with
an eager injunction to apply to him, for he was the overseer of the
grounds.
The overseer listened to my request and read in silence my reference
from the "---- House," and looked me over for a moment, and then
abruptly ordered me to report at seven o'clock on the next morning,
adding, as he disappeared within the building, that he was paying his
men a dollar and a half a day.
The old Irish gardener showed the heartiest pleasure at my success, and
directed me to a boarding-house near the Asylum grounds, where I was
soon settled, and where at noon I ate a memorable dinner, the first
square meal for thirty-six hours, and the first one which had about it
the elements of decent comfort since I left Mrs. Flaherty's table.
At seven o'clock on the next morning I was one of a gang of twenty
laborers who were digging a sewer-ditch. The ditch had passed the
farther edge of a meadow, and must cut its way through the field to
the Asylum buildings, two hundred yards beyond. Its course was marked
by a straight cut through the sod which was to furnish us a guide.
Some of the men took their former places in unfinished portions of the
work, and the rest of us fell apart, leaving intervals of about three
yards from man to man. With the cut as a guide, and with the single
instruction to keep the ditch two feet wide, we began to wield our
picks and shovels. A thick, unmoving fog lay damp upon the meadow,
already saturated with dew. The sun-rays, gathering penetrating power
as they pierced the fog, were soon producing the effect of prickly
heat. This atmosphere, surcharged with moisture and lifeless in its
sluggish weight, yet quick with stinging heat, was a medium in which
the actual work done was out of proportion to its cost in potential
energy. In the forceful Irishism of one of the laborers: "It was a
muggy morning, and a man must do his work twice over to get it done."
By dint of strenuous industry and careful imitation of the methods
of the other men, I managed to keep pace with them. I saw from the
first that the work would be hard; and in point of severity it proved
all that I expected, and more. To ply a pick and urge a shovel for
five continuous hours calls for endurance. Down sweeps your pick with
a mighty stroke upon what appears yielding, presentable earth, only
to come into contact with a rock concealed just below the surface,
a contact which sends a violent jar through all your frame, causing
vibrations which end in the sensation of an electric shock at your
finger-tips. A few repetitions of this experience are distinctly
disheartening in effect. Besides, the sun has cleared the fog, and is
shining full upon us through the still air. The trench is well below
the surface, now, and we work with the sun beating on our aching backs,
and our heads buried in the ditch, where we breathed the hot air heavy
with the smell of fresh soil, and the sweat drips from our faces upon
the damp clay.
By nine o'clock what strength and courage I have left seem oozing from
every pore. The demoralization is complete, and I know that only "the
shame of open shame" holds me to my work. I dig mechanically on through
another sluggish hour of torment; and then I come to, and find myself
breathing deeply, with long regular breaths, in the miracle of "second
wind," with fresh energy flowing like a stream of new life through my
body.
Through all the working hours of the day the foreman sat upon a pile
of tools silently watching us at the job. Now and then he politely
urged that the ditch be kept not less than two feet wide, and nothing
could have been further from his manner and speech than any approach to
abusing the men. It was his evident purpose to treat us well, but the
act of his oversight, under the conditions of our employment, involved
a practical wasting of his day, and cast upon us the suspicion of
dishonesty.
On the next morning, which was Saturday, the foreman sent me down the
ditch, where the pipe was already laid, and ordered me, with two other
men, to fill in the earth. Like a line of earthworks lay the "stubborn
glebe" above the trench. The work of shovelling it back into place
seemed easy at first, and was easy, as compared with the digging; but
the wet, cohesive clay that lined the ditch's brink yielded only to
the pressure of a compulsion very persistently applied. We quit on that
evening at five o'clock, with a full day's pay for nine hours' work.
The foreman met me on Monday morning with an order for yet another
change. At the barn I should find "Hunt," he said, and I was to report
to him as his "help." Hunt proved to be a good-looking, taciturn
teamster, who had just hitched his horses to his "truck," and he
told me to get aboard. The "truck" was a heavy four-wheeled vehicle
without a box, but with, instead, a stout platform suspended from the
axle-trees, and resting but a few inches from the ground. Standing upon
this we drove all day from point to point about the grounds, attending
to manifold needs.
We had first to cart the milk-cans from the dairy to the kitchen. This
errand took us to the rear of the Asylum buildings, where the entries
open upon a series of quadrangular courts. Then from entry to entry we
drove, gathering up great bags of soiled clothes, which lay in heaps
about the doors, and we carted these to the laundry. Then back to the
kitchen we went, and took on a load of huge cans filled with swill, and
transferred them to a large pig-sty at the edge of the wood, below the
meadow, and there emptied their contents into hogsheads, from which,
at stated hours, the swill is baled out to the loud-squealing herd
within. Again we made the round of the entries, this time to gather up
the waste barrels which stood full of ashes, and the results of the
morning's sweeping; and having emptied these, we replaced them for a
fresh supply. Then we drove to the garden, and carted from that quarter
to the kitchen several loads of vegetables.
The afternoon was consumed in supplying the demand for ice. Embedded in
a mass of hay in the ice-house, the ice must first be uncovered, and
the cakes, frozen together, must be pried apart with a crowbar and then
dragged over the melting surface to the door, and finally loaded upon
the truck.
We first carted it to the barn-yard, where we washed it by playing
water over it with a hose, and then to the kitchen wing, where we
chopped it into smaller pieces and threw these into openings which
communicated with the large refrigerators inside. Again and again was
this process repeated, until an adequate supply had been furnished, and
then there remained before six o'clock time enough to cart to the pigs
their evening meal from the kitchen.
With slight changes in detail, this remained the order of our work
through the few days of my stay. I held the job long enough to find
myself ensconced at the Asylum, and then I told the foreman that I
wished to go. He looked at me in some surprise, and began to argue
the point. "You'd better stay by your job," he said. "It is not the
best work, but we'll find better for you before long." I thanked him
heartily, and told him I was interested to learn that, but that I felt
obliged to go. He shook hands with me, and cordially wished me luck,
and told me to apply to him for work if I happened again in those
parts, and added that I could get my wages by calling at the office on
the next afternoon, which was the regular pay-day.
A free day was highly useful now, for my clothes and boots were
seriously in need of repair. The pack contained the means of much
mending, and by dinner-time my coat and trousers were patched, and my
stockings were stoutly darned. But the boots were beyond me. Already
they had cost me dear, for a dollar, the earnings of four days as a
porter, had gone for a pair of new soles, and now another outlay,
enormous in its relation to my means, was an imperative necessity.
I had made an appointment with a cobbler for an early hour in the
afternoon, precisely as one would with a dentist; for while he was at
work on my only pair of boots, I had to sit by in my stocking feet.
Secretly I welcomed the necessity, in spite of its calamitous cost.
I could take a book with me, and read with a clear conscience. The
cobbler was smoking his after-dinner cigar when I entered his shop.
He was little inclined to talk; and when he had finished his smoke he
picked up a boot, and bent over it with an air of absorption. I was
soon lost in my book.
The work was nearly done when some movement of his drew my attention to
the cobbler. I had been struck by his appearance, and now my interest
deepened. Away from his bench it would not have occurred to one to
assign him to that calling. He was an old man, whose muscular figure
had acquired a stoop at the shoulders like that of some seasoned
scholar. His features were clean-cut and strong. His blue eyes had a
look of much shrewdness and force. There were deep lines about his
mouth and in his forehead, which spoke of masterful conflict in life.
Meeting him in the dress of a gentleman, you would have said that he
was a public man of some distinction, and with close acquaintance with
affairs. In reality, he had sat for fifty years upon that bench.
He was growing communicative now; and from his personal history I
tried to divert him to his views of life, thinking that I must have
found a philosopher in a man whose opportunities for reflection had
been so great. But his talk was flowing freely, and would take its
own course, careless of my promptings. I settled myself to listen,
and my interested attention seemed to fire him with new zest. From
personal narrative it was an easy step to events of our national
history, and he warmed to these under the inspiration of the life
of some great man connected with each. General Scott was his first
hero; and touching upon details of his history, which were wholly
unknown to me, he pictured the inborn, warlike spirit of the man with
amazing appreciation, and finally quoted the judgment of the Duke of
Wellington, who, he said, had declared of Scott that, "as a general,
he stood without a superior." Here he paused for a moment to explain
that the Duke of Wellington was a personage of exceptional military
experience, whose judgments in such matters were entitled to the
highest respect.
The Civil War and Mr. Lincoln as the chief figure of those troublous
times next inspired him. It was with no mean insight into the issues
involved that he glowed with the thought of a constitutional question
grown to sharp national conflict, and settled at infinite cost,
and transmitted as a most sacred trust, to be guarded with eternal
vigilance. But the climax was reached when he turned back on his
course, and began afresh, with the Father of his Country as his theme.
The incident of the cherry-tree was repeated with sublime faith, and
with highly dramatic effect. Encouraged by his success and my absorbed
attention, he next recounted the events of that fateful June morning
when the allied American and British forces were nearing Fort Duquesne.
With keenest appreciation of the fatal irony of it, he repeated again
and again his own version of the reply made to the warning of young
Washington by General Braddock: "You young buckskin! you teach a
British officer how to fight?"
A chivalric spirit led him now to speak of "Lady Washington." This
moved him most of all, and when he declared that he would repeat for me
some lines composed by her, which he had learned by heart as a boy, his
emotions were almost beyond control. His job was finished now, and he
drew himself up, and made a strong effort to modulate his voice, which
was trembling with feeling. The lines had an evident magic for him, and
he repeated them with great throbs of emotion, while his eyes grew dim:
Saw ye my hero?
Saw ye my hero?
I saw not your hero;
But I'm told he's in the van,
When the battle just began,
And he stays to take care of his men.
Oh ye gods! I give you my charge
To protect my hero, George,
And return him safe home to my arms.
Then, bending toward me, he placed a trembling hand on my knee; and
looking dimly into my eyes, he said, in husky tones: "And they did,
didn't they?" I assented earnestly, charmed by his sincerity and
enthusiasm, only hopeful that there was some mistake in the unexpected
glimpse of Lady Washington in the character of a poet, and like my
friend struggling with feeling that I found it hard to suppress,
and which expressed, would have been sadly out of harmony with the
scriptural injunction to "weep with them that weep."
There was a charm in the old cobbler's harangue, which I felt for long.
Even his views of life seemed to appear in these crude enthusiasms upon
general themes. There was a note of optimism which one could not fail
to catch, and to respect in a man who, for fifty years, had honestly
earned his living on a cobbler's bench. His sense of proprietorship
in his country, and of natural right to high personal pride in her
history, conveyed themselves to you as strong convictions, and you
understood something of the power which dwells in a people who feel
thus toward their country, and who share in her control.
An hour later I was at the Asylum on the errand of getting my pay. I
had anticipated the appointed time by a few minutes, and was the first
of the workmen in the office. The clerk was in his place, however; and
my appearance, hat in hand, furnished him with the signal for drawing
from his desk the receipt-forms, upon which the men acknowledge the
payments by their signatures. In the bustle of the business just
beginning, the clerk turned upon me and asked, somewhat brusquely, if
I could write my name, or whether he should write it for me, and I
affix my mark. So unexpected was the question, that I was conscious at
first of some bewilderment, and then of a rising resentment against the
fact that such a question should be put to an American workman. I said
that I had acquired the habit of signing my own name when necessary;
but I might have spared myself that folly, for the clerk hastened to
explain with the kindest consideration that, of all the laborers whom
he habitually pays off, scarcely half can write; "although," he added,
with an admirable touch of fairness, "a very small proportion of the
illiterate are native-born Americans." I am afraid that my resentment
had its source in a grotesquely foolish feeling. I have been mistaken
for a drunkard, and a detective, and a disreputable double of myself,
and have been made a bogey of to frighten children into obedience
withal, but not once, so far as I know, have I been taken for a
gentleman. And if the truth must be told, I fear that the very success
of my disguise is somewhat chagrinning at times.
There was no wrench on the next morning in parting with the family
with whom I boarded, unless my landlady shared my regret at leaving.
She was a meek little woman who slaved heroically at household work to
support her daughter, who studied stenography and typewriting, and her
idle husband, who led the life of a professional invalid. He had tried
upon me highly colored tales of his career as a soldier, and of what
he would have done in life but for his ill-health, tales which I soon
learned to interrupt with small services to his wife, and he gave me
up as hopelessly unsympathetic. A baseball game on the Asylum grounds
attracted a large crowd one afternoon; and as Hunt and I drove past on
an errand, I caught sight of the ex-soldier, who, at his home, was too
great a sufferer to contribute even a helping hand at the housework
toward his own support, but who here was dancing in vigor of delight
over a two-base hit.
It was clear that a rate of progress which had carried me not even so
far as the border line of Pennsylvania, during nearly two months, would
require a considerable portion of a lifetime in which to accomplish the
three thousand miles before me. I resolved upon more energetic tramping
as a wiser policy for, at least, the immediate future.
A rough plan was soon formed. I had saved nearly six dollars. It was
Wednesday morning. I would give three days to uninterrupted walk, and
by Friday evening I should reach Wilkesbarre. The whole of Saturday,
if so much time were needed, could then be given to a search for
employment; and the rest of Sunday would put me in trim to begin on
Monday morning the work which would provide in a few days for present
needs, and furnish a balance with which to begin the tramp once more.
At an early hour I was upon the high-road which leads to Port Jervis.
The day was a perfect type of the best season of our northern climate,
cloudless but for a fleecy embankment behind the purple hills to the
north, flooded with a glorious light touched with grateful warmth, and
which revealed with articulate distinctness every visible object in the
crystal-clear air--an air so pure and cool that it spurred you to your
quickest step, and sent bounding through you a glad delight in breath
and life.
In all the landscape was the richness of color and the vividness of
a transfigured world. An early frost had touched the foliage; the
leaves of the hickory-trees and elms were rustling crisply at their
tips, and the sumach deepened into a crimson that matched the color
of its clustered seeds, while the oaks and maples maintained the dark
luxuriance of their summer leafage, boastful of a hardihood which would
succumb only to the keener cold of the later autumn.
Up hill and down dale my road led me, where substantial farm-houses,
and enormous barns, and fields of standing corn, and herds of cattle in
the pasture-lands, all indicated the necessaries and even the comforts
of life in rich abundance, and emphasized the wonder that from such
surroundings should come the recruits who ceaselessly throng our
crowded towns.
A few miles farther on the whole topography of the country changed.
I had passed through the village of Otisville and was walking in the
direction of Huguenot when my way carried me to a hillside from which I
could see the long stretch of a valley, reaching far to the westward,
and lined on both sides, with almost artificial regularity, by ranges
of hills, which rose sharply from the plain below. Through a break at
the north the Delaware flows, and, crossing the plain-like valley,
disappears among the southern hills, while the valley itself, in almost
unbroken symmetry, reaches on to the west.
At the foot of the northern range, and on the eastern bank of the
river, is the town of Port Jervis. Its outer streets are the light,
airy thoroughfares of the usual American town, faced by small wooden
cottages, each with its plot of ground devoted in front to a few square
yards of turf, and carefully economized behind the house for the
purpose of supporting fruit-trees and providing a vegetable garden.
The great number of these individual homes, as indicating the manner of
life of multitudes of the working classes in provincial towns, seemed
to me to mark a conspicuous absence of crowded tenement living; and
on its positive side to indicate at least the possibility of wholesome
family life and of much home comfort. Certainly my experience at
Highland Falls and at Middletown confirms this impression. In each
of those cases the people with whom I stayed owned their home and
the plot of land about it, which contributed thriftily toward the
family support. The houses were ephemeral wooden cottages, done in the
degrading ugliness inspired by the Queen Anne revival, and furnished
in a taste even more florid, and they were not overclean. And yet they
were comfortable homes, in which we fared handsomely, eating meat three
times a day, and varieties of vegetables and admirable home-made bread,
and knew no stint of sugar or butter, and slept in good beds in not too
crowded rooms in an upper story.
All about me here, and reaching down the long vistas of communicating
streets, were the same external conditions, until I entered the closely
built up "brick blocks" of the business quarter of the town. I could
but think how characteristic of our smaller cities is this separate
individual home-life of the wage-earning classes, and how increasingly
are the improved means of transportation rendering like surroundings
possible for the workmen of the larger towns.
Having crossed the Delaware River, about four o'clock I began a walk
through a region no less beautiful than that through which I had
passed in the morning. My way lay in the valley, directly under the
steep hills that wall it in on the north. Their densely wooded sides
cast deep shadows obliquely across the road, and in this grateful
shade I walked on, listening to the songs of birds and the murmur of
mountain-streams, and the cooling sound of spray splashing from ledge
to ledge of moss-grown rocks.
At sunset I entered the village of Milford, which nestles securely
at the foot of the mountains of Pike County, a beautiful village of
wide, well-shaded streets, where there was little to mar the elegant
simplicity of dignified country homes, untouched by harrowing attempts
at the fantastic.
By eight o'clock I was fast asleep in a workmen's boarding-house, and
at sunrise on the next morning I was on the road which turns sharply
up the mountain-side. A dense mist lay upon the valley, but my way
soon led me up to the freer air, until, upon the summit of a ridge, I
reached the clear sunshine, and could see the emerging ranges of hills
to the east and south and the white mist resting motionless on the
valley below.
Up and up I climbed into higher altitudes. Each elevation appeared, as
I approached it, the topmost crest of the mountain, and yet I gained it
only to find another rough steep beyond.
There could scarcely have been a sharper contrast with the journey of
the previous day. The graceful undulations of rich farm-lands and the
broad plain of the Huguenot flats, checkered with field and forest and
pasture, and traversed by well-kept roads, and dotted over with the
buildings of prosperous farms and thriving villages, had given place,
in the panorama of my journey, to rugged mountains, steep and densely
wooded, except where, on some less hopeless site at the very margin of
cultivation, a settler had cleared the land and begun a conflict with
the stony soil in an almost desperate struggle for a living. Here were
mountain-roads that went from bad to worse, until, before I had crossed
the range, my way degenerated into a narrow, rocky trail, overgrown
with weeds, and along which I walked for a stretch of six or eight
miles without passing a dwelling.
That was in the afternoon. At a little before twelve o'clock I
had come to Shohola Falls. There, in a "hollow" on the bank of a
mountain-stream, stood a saw-mill, surrounded by piles of bleaching
boards and a few rough, unpainted cottages. Through the open door of
a shop I caught sight of an old carpenter bending over his bench. He
entered very readily into directions about the way and told me that I
had but to follow a direct road to Kimble, and from there there was no
difficulty in the way to Tafton, which, he said, was as far as I could
get that day. Then, with an eye on my pack, he asked pointedly what
I was peddling. The forgotten magazines recurred to me and I opened
my pack and handed him a copy. The frequent change of subject and the
variety of illustration fixed for a time his excited attention.
Half a score of young children now crowded about the door, and edged
cautiously into the shop, fixing upon me eyes wide open with the hunger
of curiosity. They were all barefooted and ragged, and not one of them
was clean, and at a single glance you saw that, mountain-bred and young
as they were, there was no wholesome color in their faces, and that the
very beauty of childhood was already fading before a persistent diet
from the frying-pan.
The old carpenter presently turned upon me with the air of one who was
master of the situation.
"Would you like to sell some of them books around here?" he asked.
I told him that I should.
"Well, you're a stranger here, ain't you?"
"Yes."
"Then don't you try it. A young fellow done this place out of more'n
fifty dollars last spring, and we're kind o' careful of strangers now."
I sat on the door-step to rest, and invited the children to look at the
pictures, which they did, hesitatingly at first, with timid advances,
in which curiosity struggled with their fear of the unfamiliar. But
they grew bolder as I invented stories to match the illustrations,
and presently they were all nestling about me in the ease of absorbed
attention. One little girl of four or five, who had eyed me at first
with an anxious look of alarm, now stood leaning over my shoulder
with an arm about my neck, and her soft brown hair, escaped from her
sun-bonnet, touching my face, while she looked down upon the pictures,
and I could feel her breath quickening as the story neared its climax.
I pressed on presently, and the children ran by my side, asking for yet
one story more, and finally calling their good-byes and waving their
hands to me as I disappeared around a curve in the road.
A few miles farther on I came to a lonely farm-house, where I knocked
in quest of a dinner. The open door revealed a woman's face, so sad
and worn, so full of care and of weary years of slavish drudgery,
that quite instinctively I began to apologize, and to conceal my real
purpose in aimless inquiry about the way.
"I do not know," she said; "but won't you come in? The boys will soon
be at home for dinner, and they can tell you."
Her voice was soft and sweet, and her manner so reassuring that I
gladly followed her into the sitting-room, where she introduced me to
her daughter, a slender, dark young woman, who sat sewing by an open
window.
I hastened to make myself known as a workman on my way to Wilkesbarre,
where I hoped to get employment, and I told them of my encounter with
the carpenter at the Falls. They smiled as though the flavor of his
humor was not lost to them, and they spoke of other characters at the
settlement quite as odd as he.
Both women were dressed in the plainest calico, and without a touch of
ornament, and the house was poor; poor to the verge of poverty; but
the walls were free from chromoes and worsted mottoes, and showed,
instead, a few good engravings, and the rag-carpet on the floor blent
in accordant colors, and curtains hung neatly at the windows.
Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother said that we would delay
it no longer for the boys. We sat down at a table in a rough shed which
opened from the sitting-room. A spotless cloth covered the board, and
the service was simple and tasteful, and there was the uncommon luxury
of napkins. The dinner moved with unembarrassed ease. We talked of the
surrounding country, and its resemblance to other regions, and of the
political situation. The mother led the talk, and tactfully guarded it
from any approach to silence or to topics too intimate. Once, however,
she touched lightly upon a former home in a prosperous corner of
another State, and instantly I felt the hint of some family tragedy.
And now her two sons came shuffling in, rough and ruddy from their
work, clean-cut, well-bred young fellows, far too young I thought to be
"hauling logs," and I could read an agony of anxiety in their mother's
face as she watched them wearily take their seat on the vacant bench by
the table. They had been left in the care of the work in the absence of
their father, who had gone some miles to a neighboring settlement, "on
business," their mother added, blushing deeply, while the boys looked
hard at their plates.
The afternoon's tramp lay through the wildest part of that wild
region. From Shohola Falls to Kimble the direct road is one which
leads straight across the mountain, and is almost unbroken, and seldom
used. In all its course I passed but two or three farms; and these
revealed a pitiful poverty, in the wretched hovels which did service
as farm-houses and barns, and, more plainly, if possible, in the
squalor of little children who gaped at me from among high weeds behind
tottering fences.
On I went for miles, over a road so lonely that it recalled the
loneliness of the sea, and, like the sea, the sweep of heaving
mountains seemed unbroken in a boundless monotony. And then the
landscape had in it the beauty and the majesty of the sea, and the
whispering of the wind over vast fields of stunted pines and scrub oaks
answered to the wash of waves, and bore a fragrance and freshness to
match with ocean breezes.
Late in the afternoon my way descended abruptly by a more frequented
road in the direction of Kimble. Presently I could see a railway and
a canal, and I felt a little, I fancied, as an explorer must upon
emerging, once more, into the region of the explored.
I wished to know the distance and the way to Tafton, and so I inquired
of the first person whom I met. She was a milkmaid, and so picturesque
a figure, that I felt a pleasurable excitement in the chance of a
word with her. Her calico skirt was tucked up a little at one side.
Under one bare arm she carried a milking-stool, and a bucket in the
other hand. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her head, and hung like a
scholar's hood on her back. The sunlight was playing in glory about her
face and in her abundant auburn hair.
My excitement suddenly took another form; for, as I lifted my hat in
apologetic inquiry, there fell about me a shower of oak-leaves, which I
had placed in the crown for the sake of added coolness.
The milkmaid had met me with a clear, frank look between the eyes;
but she shrank a little now, and could not resist a startled glance,
full of questioning, as to what further my hat might contain, and she
answered me more with the purpose, I fancy, of being quickly rid of a
wanderer of such doubtful mind, than of adding to his information.
The walk from Kimble to Tafton, I presently found, could be shortened
by taking a path through the forest; and I was soon panting up the
hillside, grateful for the long twilight which promised to see me
safe, before the darkness, to my destination.
On the way I fell in with a young quarryman, whose home was near
Tafton, and who willingly became my guide. He was only sixteen, but
already he had worked for four years at his trade. His gaunt, angular
body showed plainly the marks of arrested development, when the growth
of the boy had hardened prematurely into an almost deformed figure of a
confirmed laborer.
He lunged clumsily beside me, and was inclined to be taciturn at first;
but he warmed presently to readier speech, and talked frankly of his
work and manner of life. At twelve he had been taken from school and
sent to the quarry to help his father support a growing family. And
then his days had settled into a ceaseless round of hard work, from
which there was no escape for him until he should be twenty-one, an age
which appeared to his perception at an almost infinite distance.
His attitude to his present circumstances was not a resentful one.
He seemed to think it most natural that he should help in the family
support; or, rather, no other possibility seemed to occur to him. It
was soon apparent, too, that his chiefest hope and ambition, with
reference to his ultimate freedom from that necessity, were centred
in a possible return to school advantages. He spoke of his efforts to
study after work hours, and of the hardness of such a course, and owned
to the fear of insurmountable difficulties in the future. His reticence
was gone now, and he was speaking with hearty freedom, and with his
eyes all alight with the dream of his life. I told him something of
the increased opportunities of education for men who must make their
own way, and of how many men I had known who had supported themselves
through college.
We parted at the edge of the forest, where we reached his home, a frail
shell of a shanty, standing upon stumps of felled trees, and he was
welcomed by the sight of his mother, chopping wood at the roadside, and
a troop of ragged children playing about the open door.
At nightfall, on the next evening, I entered Wilkesbarre, but I got so
far only by virtue of a long lift in a farmer's cart, which carried me,
by a stroke of great good fortune, over much the longest part of the
day's journey.
So far my plan had been carried out. It was Friday evening, and I was
safe in Wilkesbarre, somewhat worn by the walk of rather over eighty
miles, and with an increased dislike for my burdensome pack, but with
every prospect of being fit for work so soon as I should find it. My
success in that direction had been so uniform, that instead of sleeping
in the open, as I had done on the night before, I allowed myself the
luxury of a bed in a cheap boarding-house, and a supper and a breakfast
at its table, before beginning my search. Further good fortune awaited
me, for Saturday morning lent itself with cheerful brightness to the
enterprise. At an early hour I stepped out into a busy street of the
city, sore and stiff with walking, but high of hope, and not without a
certain elevation of spirit, which might have warned me of a fall.
Work on the city sewers was being carried through the public square.
I found the contractor, and applied for work as a digger. Very
courteously he took the pains to explain to me that he was obliged to
keep on hand, and pay for full time, a force of men far larger than was
demanded, except by certain exigencies, and that he could not increase
their number. Not far from the square another gang of workmen were
laying the curbstones and repairing the street, but here I was again
refused. I lifted my eyes to the site of a stone building that was
nearing completion, and there, too, no added hands were needed.
By this time I had neared the post-office, and I found letters awaiting
me there which claimed the next half hour. But even more embarrassing,
as a check to further search, was a free reading-room, which now
invited me to files of New York newspapers, in which I knew that I
should find details of recent interesting political developments at
Rochester and Saratoga, not to mention possible fresh complications in
the more exciting game of politics abroad. I went in, and like Charles
Kingsley's young monk, Philemon, who, wandering one day farther than
ever before from the monastery in the desert, chanced upon the ruins
of an old Egyptian temple; and mindful of a warning against such
seduction, yet guiltily charmed by the rare beauty of the frescoes,
prayed aloud, "Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity,"
but looked, nevertheless--I looked, too, and I read on until mounting
remorse robbed the reading of all pleasure and drove me to my task
again.
But I had fallen once; and, by a sad fatality, scarcely had I renewed
the search, with weakened power of resistance, when I stumbled upon a
fiercer temptation in the form of a library, which announced in plain
letters its freedom to the public until the hour of nine in the evening.
Forgetful of my character as a workman; miserably callous to the
claim of duty to find employment, if possible; and in any case, to
live honestly the life which I had assumed, I entered the wide-open,
hospitable doors, and was soon lost to other thought, and even to the
sense of shame, in the absorbing interest of favorite books.
In the lonely tramp across the mountains of Pike County I walked
sometimes for miles with no opportunity of quenching a growing thirst,
when suddenly I came upon a mountain-spring that trickled from the
solid rock, and formed a little pool in its shade, where I threw myself
on the ground, and, with a glorious sense of relief, drank deeply of
its cold water. The analogy is a weak one, for the physical relief and
the momentary pleasure but faintly suggest the prolonged intellectual
delight, after two months of unslackened thirst.
Here was an inexhaustible supply, and there were polite librarians who
responded cheerfully to your slightest wish; and, best of all, there
was an inner door which disclosed a reading-room, where perfect quiet
reigned, and comfortable chairs invited you to grateful ease, and
shelves on shelves of books were free to your eager hand.
To pass from one writer to another, among the volumes that lay on the
table, lingering over long-loved passages, or dipping lightly here and
there, absorbing pleasure from the very touch of the book and the sight
of the well-printed page, held by the charm of some characteristic
phrase, and finally to sink into the folds of an easy-chair with
a store of books within ready reach--what delight can equal such
satisfaction of a craving sense?
There through the livelong day I sit, and through the early evening,
until I am roused by the sound of slamming shutters which is the
janitor's signal for nine o'clock, the hour of closing for the night.
Taking my hat and stick I walk out into the gas-lit street, and into
our modern world, with its artificialities and its social and labor
problems; and I remember that I am a proletaire out of a job, and that
with shameless neglect of duty I have been idling through priceless
hours. Crestfallen, I hurry to my boarding-house, longing, like any
conscious-stricken inebriate, to lose remorse in sleep.
As I walk to my lodgings a certain fellow-feeling warms me with fresh
sympathy for my kind. I have met with my first reverse, not a serious
one, but still the search for work for the first time in my experience
has been fruitless through most of a morning. Instead of persevering
industriously, I yield weakly to the desire to forget my present lot,
and the duty it entails, in the intoxication that beckons to me from
free books. That happens to be my temptation, and I fall.
Another workman of my class, in precisely my position, encounters, not
one chance temptation which he might escape by taking another street,
but at every corner open doors which invite him to the companionship of
other men, who will help him to forget his discouragements so long as
his savings last. And as we are both turned into the street at night,
in What do we differ as regards our moral strength? He yielded to his
temptation, and I to mine.