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In this case, the evidence for the statement lay in the high wage-rate figures for three employments in particular those of engine-drivers, compositors, and builders' labourers: three industries incapable of protection by tariffs.
But that the circular went out properly signed and sealed is beyond dispute, and in reply to it there came protests from hundreds of honest engine-drivers all up and down the land. The chief of a local division came to Chicago with a copy of the circular and protested so vigorously that he was expelled from the Brotherhood, to the Brotherhood's disgrace.
Engine-drivers too, for he felt Jimbo's hand steal into his own and go to sleep there, 'but particularly little beasties that live in holes under stones and in fields. When a little mouse in wonder Flicks its whiskers at the thunder, it makes a tiny scaffolding behind which it hides in safety, shuddering. Same with Daddy's stories. Thinking and feeling does the trick.
The mornings were delightfully cool; coffee was served at sunrise, and a bountiful breakfast at ten o'clock; after that hour the heat rapidly increased until it became almost unbearable. How the engine-drivers and firemen stood it without exhaustion I cannot tell; it diminished after four o'clock in the afternoon, about which time dinner-bell rung, and the evenings were always pleasant.
The old man recalls aloud the expenditure of the day before, and writes down in a tattered notebook where and how much he had given to guards, engine-drivers, oilers.... Meanwhile the passenger train has long ago gone off, and an engine runs backwards and forwards on the empty line, apparently without any definite object, but simply enjoying its freedom.
The boy who had kept up his friendship with engine-drivers after he was an officer knew how to sink the plummet into human emotions.
Any Scotch or Yankee vagabond that likes to call himself a mechanic out here gets eighteen pounds a month, and the next you know he's cleared out, after smashing something as likely as not. I give you my word that some of the objects I've had for engine-drivers couldn't tell the boiler from the funnel. But this fellow understands his trade, and I don't mean him to clear out. See?"
Of these latter only the white puffing smoke was visible from the village, but he knew with accuracy their times of departure, their arrival, and the names of every station where they stopped. In the omnibus trains he even knew some of the guards personally, the engine-drivers too.
The driver leaned over his engine, rubbing his hands with the usual oily rag. He was a short, wiry man with grey hair and a grizzled moustache, with about him that bearing of semi-humorous, frank-faced resolution which one notes about engine-drivers as a class. 'We ought to do it, the gradients are against us, but it's a clear night and there's no wind.
Vansittart asked a porter in the railway station at The Hague. The man stared at her for a moment, then realized that the question was a serious one. "I will ask one of the engine-drivers, my lady," he answered, with his hand at the peak of his cap. It was past nine o'clock, and Mrs. Vansittart had been waiting nearly half an hour for the Flushing train.
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