But the gentleman from Connecticut represented a type which Moses had never seen before. His dress showed it, with a full suit of black, his white collar showing above his overcoat. His speech was another indication. Where most men used verbal ammunition at the rate of so many spoken words a minute, Ford’s delivery was as rapid and continuous as the outpouring of a Gatling gun.
“How many times must I tell you to be careful, men? How often must I go on insistin’ that you should not bump things on the sidewalk? This here furniture is made to sit on, not to be smashed into kindlin’ wood. Easy there, now, on that bureau! Pull out the drawers. Quick, now! One at a time. And now let go of that other end. It’s extraordinary how sensible men like you should go on ignorin’ the simplest rules of safety. Sue, my dear, tell your dear mother that I am doin’ the best I can. But that if everything is brought to a piecemeal, it’s only what’s to be expected. Out of the way, Moses, give them men plenty of room. There, that’s more like it!”
That the two broad-backed porters in linen jumpers had for years passed everything from a piano-stool to a folding-bed from the top of the highest tenement in New York, without so much as a scrape of paint from the side walls, and that nothing that Ford had said or done made the slightest impression on them, was entirely clear to Moses as he listened to their harangue.
He had seen a busy clown at the circus picking up and dropping at a critical moment the ends of the carpet spread out on the sawdust, a remembrance which pumped up another chuckle in the old darky’s interior.
When the sidewalk was cleared, the van and the supplementary cart emptied, and the entire belongings of the Ford family securely housed, and the door of the apartment discreetly closed, so that the passers up and down the staircase might not become familiar with the various imperfections of the household gods, when I say what Moses called the biggest circus he had ever seen for many a day was over, that guardian of the house moved into the rear basement to talk it all over with Matilda.
The old woman—and she was very nearly as old as Moses, sixty-five if she was a day—was busy ironing, her head tied up in a big red bandanna, her shrewd eyes peering out of a pair of big-bowed spectacles.
“Well, is you through?” her eyes on her work, not on her husband.
“Yes; through!”
“Well, what you think of him?”
Moses had dropped into a chair now and begun to untie his big green baize apron, his morning work being over.