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There are seventy shearers; about fifty washers, including the men connected with the steam-engine, boilers, bricklayers and the like; ten or twelve boundary-riders, whose duty it is to ride round the large paddocks, seeing that the fences are all intact, and keeping a general look-out over the condition of the sheep; three or four overseers; half-a-dozen young gentlemen acquiring a practical knowledge of sheep-farming, or, as it is generally phrased, "colonial experience" a comprehensive expression enough; a score or two of teamsters, with a couple of hundred horses or bullocks, waiting for the high-piled wool bales, which are loaded up and sent away almost as soon as shorn; wool-sorters, pickers-up, pressers, yardsmen, extra shepherds.
The third man, Silent Lon Cronk, sunk lower at his work, even more fiercely flattening the gemless rings under the pressers. After a few moments he laid down his tools and began to stretch his long legs, scraping into a cup the bits of gold from his lap. "I've been goin' to ask ye fellers somethin' for a long time. Might as well now as any other night, eh?" "Yep," replied Eli eagerly.
Crabbe, his short legs drawn up under his body, held a pair of pliers in his left hand, while caught firmly in the hook was a child's tiny pin. From this he tore the small jewels, threw them into a tin cup, and passed the setting on to Eli. The other man, taciturn and fierce, was flattening out by means of strong pressers several gold rings and bracelets.
From this the reader will see that Andrei Ivanovitch Tientietnikov belonged to that band of sluggards whom we always have with us, and who, whatever be their present appellation, used to be known by the nicknames of "lollopers," "bed pressers," and "marmots." Whether the type is a type originating at birth, or a type resulting from untoward circumstances in later life, it is impossible to say.
And yet this long succession of hot and smelling dens, this series of pale, stooping figures, toiling hour after hour, at fever pace, in these stifling backyards, while the June sun shone outside, reminding one of English meadows and the ripple of English grass; these panting, dishevelled women, slaving beside their husbands and brothers, amid the rattle of the machines and the steam of the pressers' irons, with the sick or the dying, perhaps, in the bed beside them, and their blanched children at their feet sights of this sort, thus translated from the commonplace of reports and newspapers into a poignant, unsavoury truth, had at least this effect they vastly quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.
Men of uncleansed souls, wedded to worldly things by various bonds, meet with destruction like embankments of sand in water. Woes of diverse kinds, born of ignorance, act like pressers of oil-seeds, for assailing all creatures in consequence of their attachments.
For the old adage, which made a tailor the ninth part of a man, has been completely reversed by the subdivision of work in modern industry. It now takes more than nine men to make a tailor. We have foremen or cutters, basters, machinists, fellers, button-holers, pressers, general workers, &c. No fewer than twenty-five such subdivisions have been marked in the trade.
Not a soul remains about the building but the pressers, who stay to work at the rapidly lessening piles of fleeces in the bins, or a meditative teamster who sits musing on a wool-bale, absorbed in a calculation as to when his load will be made up. It is sundown, a rather later time of closing than usual, but rendered necessary by the possibility of the "grand finale."
Such are not only the scavengers and sweepers, but also the workers in leather, the Chamars and Muchis of Northern and Central India, and the Chakilians and Madigas of Southern India, who with their families number 14 or 15 million souls; the washermen, the tadi-drawers and vendors of spirituous liquors, the pressers of oil, and, in many parts of the country, the cowherd and shepherd castes, &c.
"To hand pressers 64.254 per cent. of the basis wage, and when the index figure is 107 or less, but not less than 100, the percentage war wages of timeworkers shall be equal to the index figures; for every 1 per cent. decrease in the index figure below 100 the war wages of timeworkers shall be decreased 3/4 of 1 per cent.
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