I will confess that of all the workmen about the place the plumbers interested me most. They came late and quit early, and much of the intervening time was spent in asking one another questions and in ordering one another about. No tool was at hand when it was required. If the pliers were needed the whole gang of plumbers stopped work to hunt for the missing instrument, which was sometimes found in one remote spot and sometimes in another—never where it should have been. I have a theory that for reasons best known to themselves plumbers make a practice of mislaying and losing their tools.
I supposed that having once begun their work these plumbers would push it to completion. I never undertake anything that I do not keep at it until it is done and finished, and I think that this rule obtains among most of the professions and trades. Plumbers seem, however, to be a privileged class. They come to your premises and spend an hour or two examining what is to be done; then they go away. When they get ready to come back they return—this time with a miniature furnace and whatever tools they do not require. Then they go away to bring the tools they need, leaving the tools they do not require for a pretext for another trip. Then they take turns at suggesting how the proposed work should be done, and one after another they get down upon their knees and peer into closets and holes and under floors and into dark places, after which some of them go back to the "shop," for more things, while the others either sit around doing nothing or busy themselves at losing and mislaying the tools they have already at hand.
Uncle Si, who is an authority on the subject, says that there never was a plumber who died of overwork or in the poorhouse. He tells me that he once knew of a plumber named Bilkins who fell dead of heart disease one day when he discovered that he had worked four minutes overtime.
The boss painter was another individual who excited my astonishment. I never knew another man so fertile in the art of prevarication. Mr. Krome would rather lie than eat—at any rate, he would rather lie than paint. He never neglected to come over twice a day and take a long and careful survey of the house.
"I reckon you 're about ready for us, eh?" he 'd ask.
"We 're waiting on you," Uncle Si would say.
"Then I 'll have to put my gang at work in the mornin'," he would answer. This performance was repeated again and again, but the "gang" we looked for did not come. I remonstrated against this seeming neglect, but Mr. Krome blandly assured me that when his men did once get to work they would push the job with incredible speed. I knew he was a liar, yet I always believed the fellow.
We gave him the glazing to do. We even accommodated him to the extent of sending the window frames to his shop instead of making him haul them himself. We did this out of no special regard for Mr. Krome, for, aside from pure selfish considerations, Mr. Krome is no more to us than we are to Hecuba; but we desired to facilitate him in the work he had engaged to do for us.
After the window frames had been at the fellow's shop a fortnight, I began to suggest that their return would gratify me to the degree of rapture. Mr. Krome put us off with one excuse and another (all equally plausible) and presently a month had rolled by. Like the man in the fable who tried brickbats when kind words were no longer of avail, I threatened to turn the work of glazing over to another glazier who was not so busy with his lying as to prevent him from attending to the duties of his legitimate trade. This served as a mild remedy, for the window frames presently began to arrive one at a time, and I actually felt like calling upon our pastor for a special service of praise and thanksgiving when finally those windows were all in place.
The one thing that Alice, the neighbors, Uncle Si, and I were amicably agreed upon was the opinion that Mr. Krome, for a boss painter, was not worth the powder to blow him off the face of the earth. I felt tempted to tell him so, but he was at all times so amiable and so chatty that I really could not find the heart to mention a matter likely to interrupt the flow of his good nature. The chances are that Mr. Krome entertained much the same opinion of Uncle Si that Uncle Si had of Mr. Krome. My somewhat intimate association with workingmen for the last three months enables me to say that, so far as I have been able to observe, workingmen often have a precious poor opinion of one another. The plumbers talk of the carpenters as lazy and shiftless, the painters speak ill of the plumbers, the carpenters regard the tinners with derision, and so it goes through the whole category.