"How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke.
"That's true," we said, and piped down.
He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for firewood. He smiled—he was a jolly good-natured chap.
"Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone—a new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the axe and went after the cow.
The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes; then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on his face, "That's a mucker's job!"
"Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly.
"The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said.
Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, passed with his ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had made of hickory bark.
"That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a plug of dynamite!"
We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the lane.