One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves. A branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder. I lay as one dead. My wife found me there and hailed a passing grocer's wagon. The boy whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news that I had been killed by a fall. Among the first callers after the accident were Donald G. Mitchell and his daughter, my neighbours. I lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony.
Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we scraped together the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the city at seventy dollars a month. When she rented it, we hadn't seventy cents. We were to move into it the day of the accident. I insisted that we proceed.
"Send for Jimmy Moohan," I said. Jimmy was a genial old Irish expressman whose stand was at the New Haven Green. Jimmy came and looked me over. Then came Bob Grant, a foreman from a near-by manufacturing concern, and after him four Socialist comrades on their way home from work.
"Ah, Mother o' God," Jimmy said, "shure it's an ambulance yer riverence shud haave."
"I want you, Jimmy; pile me in."
"Holy Saints," he exclaimed, "shure th' ould cyart'll jolt yer guts out!"
"Pile me in."
So they lifted me on the mattress and laid me in the express wagon. Bob Grant sat beside me; the four comrades steadied it—two on each side.
"Git up now, Larry, an' be aisy wid ye."
When the wagon wheel mounted a stone, Jimmy blamed Larry and swore at him. Occasionally he would turn around and say: "How's it goin', yer riverence?"