"Boots, waggons, ploughs, the wooden parts of Singer's sewing-machines.... They are terribly hard up for hands.... You'd get a job easy.... There is a great lot of girls working in the factories, many foreign. They soon marry and go on to a farm. Factory folks make a pile of money; get tired, and then buy a few acres of land and live on it. Farms about here are split up into small portions and sold to poor folk. Some want me to divide up my farm and sell part of it, but I won't do it."
Mr. Judie had had to work all his life, and to work hard a good deal of it, and he felt entitled to have his own mind on any subject, and to act accordingly.
A wealthy American took me along in his car through Mishewaka to South Bend, and showed me the great factory of wind-mill sails, Dodge's factory of "transmission power" of pulleys and connections and all things that join up engines and plant; then the famous Studebaker's factory of plough-handles, shafts, waggons, etc., the rubber-boot factory, Singer's frame factory, and several other establishments which indicated how busy these Indiana cities are.
I tramped out to New Carlisle, spending a night there under a deep dark maple tree, which after sunset looked like a great overlapping thatch—not a poke of light came through. As I lay beside the highroad, and as the American holidays had just commenced, scores of cars came by, and as each one appeared on the road horizon it lit up my leafy ceiling with its great flashlights. How hot the night was.... I slept without covering. It was hot even at dawn.
It was next day on the road to Michigan City that I gave water to a thirsty calf, who actually ran to me and butted into me to persuade me to fill his bucket. It was on this road that having thrown a potful of water at some sheep they followed me down the dusty road, crying to me to do it again.
Michigan City was sweltering. I took refuge from the heat in the waiting-room of the large railway station, and watched the crowds in the New York and Chicago trains, and the rush of the restaurant boys with hundreds of cones of ice-cream.
A pretty negress came and sat next me and began talking.
"Ah come over heer two manths ago to the carnaval, and have been playing vaudy-ville, but the home folks said ah mus' come back. Mai, how I cried when I heard. I did take on...."
She was under police supervision, and a big Irish policeman came and took her away when he saw her talking with me. She stood on the platform until the train came in, and then she was put in charge of a guard. She had, no doubt, been arrested under suspicious circumstances in the streets of Michigan, and had been brought before a kind magistrate, who had forborne to punish her on condition that she went back to her mother.