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I don't suppose it would make any difference to her, however, for she says that Jennie is more lady-like, and further advanced in her studies than any of the girls, and that she would choose her for a companion rather than any of them, even if she had once been a street-sweeper."
We say that it is the sale of the soul to the body; it is turning the back upon life, upon growth, upon God, and descending into animalism. The true ideal of the farmer's life of any life contemplates something outside of, and above, the calling which is its instrument. The farmer's life is no better than the life of a street-sweeper, if it rise no higher than the farmer's work.
But the tramps, who had not come merely to punish Halfvorson, but also to let their wrath break loose, hardly knew how to begin. There was nothing for an angry man to do here. There was not a dog to chase, not a street-sweeper to pick a quarrel with, nor a fine gentleman at whom to throw an insult. It was early in the year; the spring was just turning into summer.
And so in order to feel that I was at least doing something for the community to earn my right to live, I was forced to pay for the opportunity and also to aid in keeping alive one of the many systems of graft, which unnaturally swallows up the results of honest men's labor. So I began work as a street-sweeper a position looked upon generally as one of the lowest in the scale of human employment.
There were ringing bells that sang alternately; and then came the little drummers that beat their tattoo in the family circle; and acquaintance was made with those who write without putting their names, which here means as much as using grease instead of patent blacking; and then there was the beadle with his boy, and the boy was the worst off, for in general he gets no notice taken of him; then too there was the good street-sweeper with his cart, who turns over the dust-bin, and calls it "good, very good, remarkably good."
The point here insisted on may be made clearer, if already it is not clear enough, by this consideration, that the man who would lose social caste for dining with an Irish street-sweeper might be congratulated for dining with an Irish educator; but President Roosevelt would scarcely have given greater offense by entertaining a Negro laborer at the White House than he gave by inviting to lunch there the Principal of Tuskegee Institute.
Morton Mitchell of San Francisco, who lives in Paris in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne, discovered after the war broke out that the street-sweeper to whom she had often given largesse left behind him when called to the Front something like seventeen dependents. Indeed, they lost no time acquainting her with the fact; they called on her in a body, and she has maintained them ever since.
An illustrative incident occurred while I held the unique position of street-sweeper, and at the same time being a guest at the fashionable Waldoria Hotel. I had become acquainted with many of the wealthy guests of the place, who, no doubt, supposing me to be a man of riches, courted my society to some extent. In fact, I had become rather popular among the permanent residents.
"Probably as a white-wings," laughed Elizabeth. "But if so I positively refuse to permit you to stop in the middle of Michigan Boulevard and converse with a street-sweeper while I'm with you." Jimmy's new job lasted two weeks, and then the milk-wagon drivers went on strike and Jimmy was thrown out of employment. "Tough luck," sympathized the Lizard. "You sure are the Calamity Kid.
Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain. Though the picture be the veriest mess, the light and movement cause the beholder to do a little reptilian thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper enters the place, heavy as King Log. A ditch-digger goes in, sick and surly. It is the state of the body when many men drink themselves into insensibility.
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