The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

CHAPTER VI IN A LOGGING CAMP

Fitz-Adams's Camp, English Centre, Lycoming
County, Pa., Tuesday, October 27, 1891.

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you going?"

"I'm looking for a job."

"You want work on a farm?"

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is this the camp of Wolf Run?"

"Yes."

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

"No, he's in English Centre."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you ever worked in the woods?"

"No."

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

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

Again I appealed to Achilles:

"Is there another camp near here?"

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

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

"And where is that?" I asked.

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is this Fitz-Adams's Camp?"

"Yes."

"Is Mr. Fitz-Adams here?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Who sent you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

"No."

"How's that?"

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

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

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

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

There rose a tumult of loud voices:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

CHAPTER VII IN A LOGGING CAMP (Concluded)

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

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

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

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

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

"No," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey, Bob!"

"Hello!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Toler sent me for a crowbar."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," I said.

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

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

"I've had good advantages."

And then eagerly from him:

"Major, can you figure?"

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

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

"I will, with pleasure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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