CHAPTER IV[ToC]
WE EMIGRATE TO AMERICA
Going down the path to town bitterly and blindly, I met Murphy. He was a man with not a gray hair in his head who was a sort of man-of-all-work for the neighborhood. He took care of my furnace and fussed about the grounds when I was tied up at the office with night work. He stopped me with rather a shamefaced air.
"Beg pardon, sor," he began, "but I've got a bill comin' due on the new house—"
I remembered that I owed him some fifteen dollars. I had in my pocket just ten cents over my carfare. But what arrested my attention was the mention of a new house.
"You mean to tell me that you're putting up a house?"
"The bit of a rint, sor, in —— Street."
The contrast was dramatic. The man who emptied my ashes was erecting tenements and I was looking for work that would bring me in food. My people had lived in this country some two hundred years or more, and Murphy had probably not been here over thirty. There was something wrong about this, but I seemed to be getting hold of an idea.
"How old are you, Murphy?" I asked.