Hawkwood, the carpenter, spoke of the ideals of labor and how he would fight for them through this and other lives until his words, to my conservative and immature mind, seemed threats against organized society.
My views, in the main, he called old-fashioned. I believed a laborer who was thrifty, efficient and industrious did not need a union to help him, arguing the union only helped the inefficient, lazy and profligate.
I tried several times to get him to rest on the springhouse slab or dream couch, but his mind and temperament were too nervously active.
On Sunday he expected to go to Lexington for the day, but at train time a heavy shower caused him to abandon the trip. I asked him to go to Pine Grove church, but he very emphatically declined.
At dinner, with malice aforethought, I kept his plate heaped up and repeatedly filled his goblet with ice-cooled buttermilk. After dinner as it was a very warm day, I suggested we go to the springhouse and read, and from the library got for him Fox's "Lives of The Martyrs."
I took the lead and appropriated the rustic chair under the elms, forcing him to occupy the stone bench in the springhouse.
He made several efforts to start an argument on the labor question, which I carefully avoided. After awhile a sonorous snore announced that he had fallen victim to my plot.
His snoring was broken by a jumble of words in English and Italian, though his English, being of a very old form, was harder than the Italian to understand and transcribe. The first words I caught were; "Very well, Sir John, avanti!"
I took down his statement and give to the reader a liberal transcription of my notes.