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This wild Irish brick-layer and who knows what beside who was he to block the Elder's plans with his handful of gold? The gold! How well the Judge remembered that day, and how when Mike was gone, he had sat contemplating the shining pieces! What a fool the man was to carry such stuff on his person! The careful Judge never dreamed that the money had come from his own bank.
One evening I saw a man whose family was still living on fifteen dollars a week lose more than six hundred dollars in poker and then take a group of congenial spirits out for a spree that cost him a few hundred dollars more. One man in this party, who was said to be worth three-quarters of a million, had only recently worked as a common brick-layer.
For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another white elephant on his hands. Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impassively, disdainfully.
Besides, why may not the Plaisterer more reasonably pretend the same to the Painter, and many other Trades against one another, as the Brick-layer to the Stone-Cutter, &c. that they understand the Trade, and that truly too, and that they cannot subsist without this incroachment?
The labour and capital question was instantly solved, for everybody became a capitalist-carpenter, brick-layer, blacksmith, singing teacher and preacher. There is no difference between the shrewdest business man and a fool in a boom, for the boom levels all grades of intelligence and produces as distinct a form of insanity as you can find within the walls of an asylum. Lots took wings sky-ward.
But here they take their right place, and Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander have to take a back seat. The greatest military genius our world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston died during the Revolution by the name of Absalom Jones. Wherever he goes, crowds flock to see him.
Have you anything to say to interest them? Think. If they were to file in here now and ask you to make a few remarks, could you, for the life of you, say one single thing that would interest them?" "I do not pretend, or aspire," said Mr. Queed, "to dispense frothy nothings tricked out to beguile the tired brick-layer.
He experimented in the oven of his wife's cooking-stove, and in every other kind of oven to which he could gain access; he induced a brick-layer to make him an oven, paying him in rubber aprons; he grew yellow and shrivelled, for he and his family were living upon the charity of neighbors; more than once, there was not a morsel of food in the house; his friends thought seriously of shutting him up in an asylum; he tried to get to New York, but was arrested for debt, and thrown into prison.
At their head was the fat proprietor of the hotel, and each of them carried with him in his hand a packet of visiting cards, which they severally deposited on my bed, as I, more than ten times astounded, stood resting on my elbows gazing at them. "So-and-so, brick-layer and roof-maker.
"Mike's a brick-layer an' would give the coat off his back for me, but he's movin' about so over the country, bein' single, you see, that I can't get a letter to him. I did write to him where I heard from him last, but me letter come back. He don't write often, you see, thinkin' Denny an' me is all right. I ain't seen him since he was here to help put poor Jack away."
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