"I'm too tired," I said.
He turned on the wagon step. "Jump in," he said; and when I was seated beside him he clucked to the horse, who raised his drooping head and started off diagonally across the street, apparently confident that he would find another cobblestone to contemplate, eighteen inches in front of his fore-legs.
"A good many more people find it hard to sleep nowadays than ever before," he said. "You can tell by the windows that are lit up. Though very often it's diphtheria or something of the sort. You hear the little things whimper, and sometimes a man will run down the street and pull the night-bell at the drug-store."
"Then you don't read all the time while you are driving?"
"Oh, you notice those things and keep on reading. It isn't very noisy about this time of the day." He laughed.
"I should think you'd be tired," I said.
He said they did not work them too hard in his line. The hours were reasonable. At one time there was an attempt on the part of the dairy companies to make the hours longer; but the milkmen have some union of their own, and there was a strike which ended in the companies agreeing to pay for over-time from 7 to 9 a.m. Their association was more of a social and benefit society than a trade union. Once a month in summer they had an outing with lunch and some kind of a cabaret show and dancing. They were a contented lot. The work was not too exacting. He could read the evening paper when it got light enough, or sometimes he could just sit still and think.
Think what?
Again I envied him. What extraordinary facilities this man had for thinking straight, for seeing things clearly in this crisp morning air, and around him silence and everything as fresh, as frank, as fragrant as when the world was still young.
He blushed and hesitated, but finally confessed that for more than a year he had been carrying about in his head a scenario for a moving-picture play. His story was naturally interrupted at frequent intervals as he went about the distribution of his milk bottles. But stripped of repetitions and ambiguities the plot he had evolved in the course of more than a year's driving through the silent streets was about as follows: