Her husband is a painter, a little round man with red hair and high spirits, who is a well-preserved veteran of the Civil War, and very fond of telling you of his life as a "recruitie."
Minnie is their daughter. She inherits her father's hair, and gives promise of his rotundity. But just now Minnie is fifteen, and the world is a very interesting and exciting place. She took her first communion last Easter, and still wears her confirmation dress on Sundays, and is really pretty in a blushing effort to look unconscious when Charlie McCarthy calls.
Charles appears regularly on Sunday afternoons, I gather. He is a driver for an ice-dealer, is not much older than Minnie, and is very proud of a light-gray suit and a pair of highly polished brown boots.
Tom is Minnie's only brother. He is a stoker on a river-boat, and can spend only his Sundays at home. Tom is a little past his majority, and takes himself very seriously as a man. He tells you frankly that he is earning "big money," and is anxious that you shall not escape the knowledge that he is a libertine.
The child that he is came comically to the surface last night, with no least regard for the newly found dignity of manhood. Tom shares one of the beds in my room, and in the middle of the night he came bounding to the floor in a nightmare, and running to the door began pounding it with both hands, and screaming, "Papa! Papa!" like a child in a paroxysm of fear. He soon woke himself, and then he slunk into bed and was surly with us as we crowded about him, eager to know the cause of this violent awaking.
Jerry and Pete and Jim and Tom Wilson and I are the boarders. Wilson's is the only surname that I know. Surnames are little in use on this level of society; they smack of a certain formality like that which attaches to Sunday clothes. We were all sitting on the porch after supper on my first evening, and I knew that the men were taking my measure. Jerry broke the silence with an abrupt inquiry after my name. I responded with my surname. Jerry took his pipe from his mouth, and turned to me with some warmth: "That's not what I want to know. What's your first name? What's a man to call you?" "Oh, call me John," I said, with sudden inspiration, and I have passed as "John" accordingly.
Wilson and I worked together at unskilled labor, and we have a bed in common; and it was during a night of fearful heat, when neither of us could sleep, that Wilson, in a burst of confidence, told me his full name.
I had noticed him as a new-comer on the works on Wednesday morning. He accepted the job with alacrity, and, in spite of evident physical weakness, he went to work with feverish energy. At noon hour we shared a dinner, and he told me that he had slept in the open for three nights running, and had had nothing to eat since the previous noon. I referred him to Mrs. Flaherty, and at supper I found him at a place at her table.
It was that night that he gave me his confidence. Two years ago he came to America from the north of Ireland. From the first he had found it hard to get work, and he had never kept a job long. This was chiefly due, he said, to his having been brought up to the work in the linen-mills, and to the difficulty that he found in adapting himself to any other. And now his narrative suddenly glowed with active personal interest, for, with each succeeding sentence about his apprenticeship in Lurgan, there rose into clearer memory visions of a charming fortnight once spent at the home of the owners of the mill.
I have set for myself to-day the task of describing the past week of actual service in the ranks of the industrial army. My pen runs wide of the subject, and I have to force it to the retrospect. There were five working-days of nine hours and a quarter each, less the "called time" eaten out by the rain. Never was there clearer proof of the pure relativity of time measured by an artificial standard. Hours had no meaning; there were simply ages of physical torture, and short intervals when the physical reaction was an ecstasy.