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With devout attention he would listen to Marie's little troubles, and the boy's narrations of everything that they did and saw. In return he told them the adventures of his boyhood, or related his experiences in the stone-breaking yard, swaggering suitably, in order not to be outdone. When Pelle came to fetch his father the four of them would be sitting down to some childish game.
The stone-breaking test is monstrous. Half a ton of stone from any man in return for partially supplying the cravings of hunger is an outrage which, if we read of as having occurred in Russia or Siberia, would find Exeter Hall crowded with an indignant audience, and Hyde Park filled with strong oratory. But because this system exists at our own doors, very little notice is taken of it.
At last he came upon a broader road which bore unmistakable signs of military workmanship in its construction, and here he met, and passed with laconic greeting, a few peasant women returning with empty baskets from some neighbouring market; or perhaps a "cantonnier" here and there, plodding home with "sabots" swinging heavily and round shoulders bent beneath the burden of his weighty stone-breaking implements.
The file of convicts was broken up into gangs; "317" belonged to the stone-breaking gang, and worked outside the frowning walls. As they slowly passed out of the gate to the road, the sentries unswung their rifles many successful attempts to escape had been made by convicts in the past.
The seven-hour day is the regular working day. This does not imply that wood-cutting, digging, stone-breaking, and a hundred other daily tasks should only be performed during seven hours. Indeed not. There will be fourteen hours of labor, work being done in shifts of three and a half hours.
But it consoled us a little to watch the stone-breaking machine crunching up small rocks as though they had been lumps of sugar, and after looking at that we set off for the unfinished station, and could take in, even in its present skeleton state, how commodious and handsome it will all be some day.
This is what people thought they had noticed: Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself to the forest with his pickaxe.
Work, apart from the fact that it is God's method of supplying the wants of man's composite nature, is an essential to his well-being in every way and on this Plan there is work, honourable work none of your demoralising stone-breaking, or oakum-picking business, which tantalises and insults poverty, Every worker will feel that he is not only occupied for his own benefit, but that any advantage reaped over and above that which he gains himself will serve to lift some other poor wretch out of the gutter.
When Clare came to make up the account of his income derived from the annuals, he found that his labours in this direction were less remunerative than stone-breaking on the road would have been. He thereupon determined to break his connexion with the silk-bound periodicals, with the exception of two or three of the class, Allan Cunningham's 'Anniversary' among the number.
His act was the old stone-breaking stunt, already explained, except that he had the stones broken on his head instead of on his body. He protected his head with a small blanket, which he passed for examination, and this protection seemed excusable, considering that he had to do at least seven shows a day.
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