“I was on time in that affair,” said Quincy, conscious, when too late, that he had wasted a pun on an obtuse individual. “Are you still carpentering?”
“Yes. Lots of new houses going up, and Ben Bates and me have all we can handle. Here, Ben, come here. The Governor's askin' 'bout you.”
Benjamin Bates was rather diffident, and had been holding back, but at Bob's invitation came forward.
“How d'ye do, Governor?” was his salutation. Diffidence when forced to action often verges on forwardness.
“Glad to meet you again,” said Quincy. “Robert says they keep you busy.”
“Yes, we don't have so many resting spells now they use donkey engines as we did when Pat or Mike had to climb the ladder.”
“The march of improvement forces us all into line,” said Quincy as he greeted Miss Seraphina Cotton.
“Teaching school, now, Miss Cotton?”
“No, your Excellency, I am fortunately relieved from what became, near the end of my long years of service, an intolerable drudgery. Teaching American children to talk English is one thing, but teaching French Canadians, Poles, Germans, Russians, Italians, and Greeks was quite a different proposition.”
“And yet it is a most important work,” said Quincy—“making good citizens from these various nationalities. America, to-day, is like a large garden, with a great variety of flowers from foreign stalks.”