“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”
The fellow came into the mills and sympathized with us because we worked with our shirts off. To withstand the heat we stripped to the waist. We didn't want to wear a shirt. It would have clung to our flesh and hampered our moving muscles. We were freer and cooler without any cloth to smother us. It was a privilege to go shirtless. Adam enjoyed that blessing in the Garden of Eden. And when he sinned they punished him by putting a shirt, collar and necktie on him. And yet this theorist in the mills demanded working conditions that would let us wear shirts. Why? Who was asking for shirts? Only he, and he had a shirt. In their own words, the fellows would have enjoyed making him eat it.
CHAPTER XXXV. AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY
The uplifter saw the men between heats drinking beer out of tin pails.
“Why do those big fine fellows drink beer,” he asked me, “when they have plenty of water?”
I asked him: “Why don't you drink beer?”
“It makes me bilious,” he replied. “If I drink one glass of beer every day for a week it upsets me and I get weak and dizzy.”
“Do you think that one drink of beer a day will upset those fellows and make them dizzy?”
“Evidently not.”