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"Livingstone is a good fellow, but he's not a politician, Artie. He thinks he can ru manage the affairs of this vil metropolis without the Irish and especially without the Catholics. Oh, he's death on them, except as boot-blacks, cooks, and ditch-diggers. He'd let them ru manage all the saloons.
That such a circumstance, however glorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to children thereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to become ditch-diggers or tip-takers.
A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches. These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, are quartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them in order, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor. Humble folk these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters. Those at Pont-
I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that strange afternoon ended, when one of a gang of ditch-diggers, swathed in bright-colored rags, addressed me in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora, who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get, him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on board ship.
"It's all very well for you to talk, Zeb Jarvis," growled Zeke. "You haven't been here very long yet; and you stayed at home when others started out to fight. Now that you've found that digging and not fighting is the order of the day, you're just suited. It's the line of soldiering you are cut out for. When fighting men and not ditch-diggers are wanted, you'll find me "
Johnny-cake stopped his race for the first time, and went a little closer, and called out in a very loud voice "I've outrun an old man, and an old woman, and a little boy, and two well-diggers, and two ditch-diggers, and a bear, and a wolf, and I can outrun you too-o- o."
He did everything that young Dillon used to do before he left home ... a scamp he was too. He danced jigs, flattered the girls, chummed with the ditch-diggers and barkeepers ... and he hated them all, women and men. The Yankees hate the Irish as easy as they breathe. I tell you he had forgotten nothing that he used to do as a boy.
Wayland sat down on the slab seat, and the personal reasons came trooping against his resolutions like the scouts of an oncoming host. To begin with, he could make more money outside the Service. The Government men were paid less than foreign ditch-diggers; but then, which of the men remained in the Service for money?
"Dear boy, you can't expect a girl, brought up as I have been, to believe that society is upside down, and would be better if it were tipped over the other way and run by a lot of hod-carriers and ditch-diggers and cooks. Can you, now?" "Of course not. Nor is that what I advocate. I'm for the under dog. For fair play. So are you, aren't you?
"Ye can, can ye? we'll see about that?" said they; and they threw down their picks and ran after him, but couldn't catch up with him, and soon they had to sit down by the roadside to rest. On ran Johnny-cake, and by-and-by he came to two ditch-diggers who were digging a ditch. "Where ye going, Johnny-cake?" said they.
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