Quietly and mysteriously, I fancy, to the other servants, I appeared among them at the "—— House," and with as little notice I tried to steal away. Instead of going to the kitchen at five o'clock on that Wednesday morning for scrubbing-water, I took to the road with my pack, and left behind me the "—— House" awaking to life in the servants' quarters.
I had been a gang-laborer and a hotel porter, and now I wondered what my next rôle was to be. But the feeling was simply a genial curiosity, and was free from the timid shrinking with which I set out from the minister's house in Wilton, and my lodgings at Highland Falls. Then it was under the spur of self-compulsion that I launched afresh upon this fortuitous life. With strong animal instinct I had clung to any haven where shelter and food were secure. Now I warmly welcomed a freer courage born of experience. Not too sure of newly gained powers, but like a boy learning to swim, I fancied that I felt the strength of some confidence in the novel element. Light-hearted in spite of my pack, which gained weight with every step, I walked briskly along the country roads, charmed with everything I saw, and feeling sure that my wages would see me through to another job. Was it a real acquisition, and had I learned to catch the strange pleasure of this fugitive life? or did the difference lie in the bracing cool of the morning, and the beauty of the open country, and the sense of freedom after long restraint, and, most subtly of all, in that little, hoarded balance in my purse?
It was nightfall when I entered Middletown, and too late to look for work. With my eye upon the rows of cottages which line the street by which I entered the town, I soon found a boarding-house for workmen. A bed could be had for twenty cents. At a bakery near by I got a loaf of bread and a quart of milk for a dime, and was thus supplied with a supper and breakfast. Twelve hours of unbroken sleep fell to me that night, and in the cool of a threatening morning I set out to find work. The scaffolding about a brick building in process of erection drew my attention, and I applied for a job as a hod-carrier, but found no demand there for further unskilled labor. The boss in charge refused me with some show of petulance, as though annoyed by repeated appeals. He was not more cheerful, but was politely communicative enough when I asked after the likelihood of my finding work in the town. "There is no business doing," he said. "The bottom has fallen out of this place. There's two men looking for every job here, and my advice to you is to go somewhere else."
At the head of the street I came upon the foundation work of another building, which, I learned, was to be an armory. Here the boss instantly offered me a job, if I could lay brick or do the work of a mason, but of unskilled labor he said that he had an abundant supply. "But yonder," he added, "is the Asylum, and much work is in progress on the grounds, and there, surely, is your best chance of employment."
The Asylum was a State Homœopathic Institution for the Insane. I could see the large brick buildings on the highest area of spacious grounds, which spread away in easy undulations, with their natural beauty heightened by the tasteful work of a landscape gardener.
Near the entrance to the grounds I came upon a large force of laborers digging a ditch for a water-main. The boss refused me a place, but not without evident regret at the necessity, and he was at pains to explain to me that, already on that morning, he had been obliged to turn away half a dozen men.
It was with no great expectation of success at finding work there that I began walking somewhat aimlessly through the Asylum grounds. The first person whom I met was an old Irish gardener. He painfully stood erect as I questioned him as to whom I should apply for a job, and supported himself with one hand on my shoulder, while he told me of the medical superintendent, and the overseer, and the foreman, who are in charge of various departments of the work. Presently, his face brightened with excitement as he pointed to a large man who was walking toward one of the buildings, and he pushed me in his direction with an eager injunction to apply to him, for he was the overseer of the grounds.
The overseer listened to my request and read in silence my reference from the "—— House," and looked me over for a moment, and then abruptly ordered me to report at seven o'clock on the next morning, adding, as he disappeared within the building, that he was paying his men a dollar and a half a day.
The old Irish gardener showed the heartiest pleasure at my success, and directed me to a boarding-house near the Asylum grounds, where I was soon settled, and where at noon I ate a memorable dinner, the first square meal for thirty-six hours, and the first one which had about it the elements of decent comfort since I left Mrs. Flaherty's table.
At seven o'clock on the next morning I was one of a gang of twenty laborers who were digging a sewer-ditch. The ditch had passed the farther edge of a meadow, and must cut its way through the field to the Asylum buildings, two hundred yards beyond. Its course was marked by a straight cut through the sod which was to furnish us a guide. Some of the men took their former places in unfinished portions of the work, and the rest of us fell apart, leaving intervals of about three yards from man to man. With the cut as a guide, and with the single instruction to keep the ditch two feet wide, we began to wield our picks and shovels. A thick, unmoving fog lay damp upon the meadow, already saturated with dew. The sun-rays, gathering penetrating power as they pierced the fog, were soon producing the effect of prickly heat. This atmosphere, surcharged with moisture and lifeless in its sluggish weight, yet quick with stinging heat, was a medium in which the actual work done was out of proportion to its cost in potential energy. In the forceful Irishism of one of the laborers: "It was a muggy morning, and a man must do his work twice over to get it done."