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"He does nothing," smiled Isabel; "he's a gentleman of large leisure." "Well, I call that a shame when I have to work like a car-conductor," Miss Stackpole replied. "I should like to show him up." "He's in wretched health; he's quite unfit for work," Isabel urged. "Pshaw! don't you believe it. I work when I'm sick," cried her friend.
On the following Thursday you meet him again, and he is a car-conductor. Next week he will be squirting soda in a drug-store. It's the fault of these dashed magazines, with their advertisements of correspondence courses Are You Earning All You Should? Write To Us and Learn Chicken-Farming By Mail . . . It puts wrong ideas into the fellows' heads. It unsettles them. It was so in this case.
At the same time I knew a car-conductor, married some six or seven years, and the father of three children. He, too, was found to be suffering from incipient tuberculosis. He, too, was ordered to Saranac. But having a wife and three children to support, Saranac was out of the question. He went on conducting his car till his cough became distressing, whereupon he was "fired."
At the same time he scattered his rays impartially on those poor passers-by whom necessity sent out, so early in the morning, to gain their daily bread, He even had a smile for the poor clerk, who, in a thin overcoat, was hurrying to his office, as well as for the grisette, shivering under her thin, insufficient clothing; for the workman carrying half a loaf under his arm, for the car-conductor as he punched the tickets, and for the dealer in roast chestnuts, who was roasting his first panful.
And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend: "NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868. "Dear Pete, It is splendid here this forenoon bright and cool.
"I never could endure Hi; he didn't have the manners of a car-conductor, and this young man's real polite and kind, besides having a much more high-toned face. I don't believe you can run him out, either. He looks the kind to stay or go, just as suits him. And I'd advise you to think this matter over before you give it publicity. I might go out and speak to Isabel quietly "
I remember a dinner given by the Whitman Society about twenty years ago, at the St. Denis Hotel, which was both grotesque and pitiable. The guest of honour was "Pete" Doyle, the former car-conductor and "young rebel friend of Walt's," then a middle-aged person. John Swinton, who presided, described Whitman as a troglodyte, but a cave-dweller he never was; rather the avatar of the hobo.
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