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For example, there is stone-breaking, and the general preparation of materials for the repair of the highway; the levelling of hills, and the raising of valleys; the clearing of main ditches; the draining of mosses; the dredging of rivers; the reclaiming of lands from the waste, or the sea; the collecting of certain manures; the raising of embankments to prevent the overflow of rivers; the cleansing of streets and the performance of certain kinds of labour for union-houses and other institutions supported at the public expense; and if the highway trusts should be consolidated, and placed under competent management, it is likely that some of the labour required might be performed by paupers.
During Stella's performance, which followed, the orchestra played jerkily and then stopped, for Yvonne had never yet succeeded in looking on at the child's contortions without a pang of the heart. But the act went smoothly enough, and the entertainment, which lasted nearly an hour, concluded with Cleofonte's exhibition of prowess and the stone-breaking episode of which he was so justly proud.
He sent for his gardener Downes, who had been foreman of the street-sweepers; laid in a stock of picks and shovels; took lessons in stone-breaking himself, and called on his friends to spend their recreation times in doing something useful.
Indeed, as regarded remuneration for the time, stone-breaking would have done better. A thousand copies were printed, of which, after a lapse of five or six years, about 300 had to be converted into another form, and sold as belonging to a cheap edition. In its original form The Warden never reached the essential honour of a second edition.
Thoughts such as these had a cowing effect on me. They made me feel somewhat like the fresh prisoner who has been put to work at stone-breaking to have his wild spirit broken. I dared not give up my new occupation. I would force myself to work hard, and as I did so the very terrors of my toil would fascinate me, giving me a sense of my own worth.
In recent years we have had Sebastian Miller, whose specialty was wrestling and stone-breaking; Samson, a recent English exhibitionist, Louis Cyr, and Sandow, who, in addition to his remarkable strength and control over his muscles, is a very clever gymnast.
The work given is the same as that given to felons in gaol, oakum-picking and stone-breaking. The work, too, is excessive in proportion to what is received. Four pounds of oakum is a great task to an expert and an old hand. To a novice it can only be accomplished with the greatest difficulty, if indeed it can be done at all. It is even in excess of the amount demanded from a criminal in gaol.
Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead.
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