The strength of social conventions is a force to be reckoned with among the working classes. It may seem that below the standing of folk gentle by birth and breeding there are no social standards or social barriers of serious strength. I begin to suspect that distinctions are as clearly made on one side of that line as the other. Very certain I am that the upper servants here and the nurses and house-maids are removed from us of the clothes-washing and dish-washing and floor-scrubbing fraternity by a very considerable social gulf.
A course of eighteen hours of continuous daily duty soon gives one a surprising relish for the pleasure of doing as you please. I know now something of the delight of a "Sunday off." I got my first leave of absence one afternoon when I was allowed to go to the village of Central Valley to have my boots mended. Not since I was a small boy at boarding-school have I felt the same vivid pleasure in going freely forth, knowing that, for the time, I was my own master; and when I returned to the hotel, it was very much with the school-boy's feeling of passing again under the yoke.
CHAPTER IV A HIRED MAN AT AN ASYLUM
Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania,
Saturday, September 19, 1891.
I have a wide sweep of country to cover from the "—— House" in the Highlands above the Hudson, where I served as a porter, and received with my wages a reference to the effect that my work was done "faithfully and well," to the coal regions of Pennsylvania in the valley of the Susquehanna.
My spirits rise at every recollection of the journey. For days I walked through the crisp autumn air, breathing its tingling freshness, and barely sensible of fatigue.
The way led me over the rich farm-lands of Orange County, and across the Delaware, and through the lonely wilderness of the Pennsylvania border, until I emerged upon the hills above the Susquehanna, and caught sight of the splendid valley, with its native beauty hideously marred by the blackened trails of forest fires and the monstrous heaps of culm that mark the mouth of the coal-pits.
So far work has not failed me, unless I mark as an exception the single case when I began a search, and brought it abruptly to an end by descending suddenly upon a camping party of friends.