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He drowsed through the day, disturbed by occasional howls from the quadrangle, where the men were snowballing a little, and, later, by the scraping shovels of the navvies who had been sent in to remove the snow, and with it the efficient cause of nocturnal disorders in St. Gatien's.
Many labourers now wander far and wide as navvies, &c., and perhaps when these return home, as most of them do, to agricultural labour, they are the most useful and intelligent of their class, from a readiness they possess to turn their hand to anything. I know one at this moment who makes a large addition to his ordinary wages by brewing for the small inns, and very good liquor he brews, too.
Fine though this illustration may be of the qualities of the gentleman, we can match it by another equally good, of two English navvies in Paris, as related in a morning paper a few years ago. "One day a hearse was observed ascending the steep Rue de Clichy on its way to Montmartre, bearing a coffin of poplar wood with its cold corpse.
We need hardly say that Charley made a night of it in a very different manner from that to which he and his brother navvies were so well accustomed. The next morning, at ten o'clock, the court was again crowded. The judge was again on his bench, prepared for patient endurance; and Lord Killtime and Sir Gregory Hardlines were alongside of him.
Brassey, "the leviathan contractor, the employer of untold thousands of navvies, the genie of the spade and pick, and almost the pioneer of railway builders, not only in his own country, but from one end of the continent to the other."
On my interposing, he placed a gold-mounted glass in his eye, and, with a degress of rudeness which I have never seen equalled in a navvies' camp, stared straight in my face till I had done speaking. Then the lens dropped from his eye, and he turned to his companion. "Who is this person, Montgomery?" he asked. The squatter looked plainly displeased.
In five minutes our feet weighed pounds, and we understood the navvies' saying that they "took up land wherever they worked." Goloshes were useless, and we soon discarded them, and, but for fear of hurting my feet with hidden stones or sticks, I would have discarded my shoes too. Still on we plodded, sinking to our ankles at almost every step; it was warm work.
'Are you ill, Alaric? said Gertrude, directly she saw him. 'Ill! No, said he; 'only fagged, dearest; fagged and worried, and badgered and bored; but, thank God, not ill; and he endeavoured to put on his usual face, and speak in his usual tone. 'I have kept you waiting most unmercifully for your dinner, Charley; but then I know you navvies always lunch on mutton chops.
Woodward certainly had expected that he would have spent those two hours in smoking and attacking the parlour- maid. He went to church, however, and seemed in no whit astray there; stood up when others stood up, and sat down when others sat down. After all, the infernal navvies, bad as they doubtless were, knew something of the recognized manners of civilized life.
The English are also the best miners, the best tool-makers, the best instrument-makers, the best "navvies," the best ship-builders, the best spinners and weavers. Mr. Brassey says that during the construction of the Paris and Rouen Railway, the Frenchman, Irishman, and Englishman were employed side by side.
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