“Oh, ye work all day for Paddy O’Shea, Dhrrrill, ye terriers, dhrrrill!”
Human nature cannot endure this for long, and presently a shower of sticks and tufts of turf drive Harry from his position and put an end for the time to his song.
Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and then we are free.
It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer. A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be, from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn fool!’”
Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of all that.
We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived a few days before and had found instant employment.