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Updated: June 19, 2025
When he was young there had been intoxication for such a spectator as Ancrum in the magical rapidity and ease with which he seized opportunity and beat down difficulty. Now that he was mature, he was but one patient toiler the more at the eternal puzzles of our humanity. Ancrum let him talk awhile.
The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in two memorable sayings the Japanese conception of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow.
Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour of man after all: but at least let the pitcher that stands by the well be beautiful and surely the labour of the day will be lightened: let the wood be made receptive of some lovely form, some gracious design, and there will come no longer discontent but joy to the toiler. For what is decoration but the worker's expression of joy in his work?
In the shadow of every great cathedral lies collected the moth and rust from the coppers of myriad-handed toilers of five and ten centuries. The towers and domes of London, and Paris, and Amsterdam, and Dublin are monuments to the genius of the architect and to the faithfulness of the common toiler.
This indifference was undoubtedly the outcome of a life of want and social injustice; it was the indifference of an old toiler, who, weary of struggling and hoping for improvements, was now quite ready to tolerate the crumbling of a social system, which threatened him with hunger in his impotent old age.
But, when the sun is low, and the shadows creep out, when the old inn blinks drowsy eyes at the cottages, and they blink back drowsily at the inn, like the old friends they are; when distant cows low at gates and fences; when sheep-bells tinkle faintly; when the weary toiler, seated sideways on his weary horse, fares, homewards, nodding sleepily with every plodding hoof-fall, but rousing to give one a drowsy "good night," then who can resist the somnolent charm of the place, save only the "Bull" himself, snorting down in lofty contempt as rolling of eye, as curly of horn, as stiff as to tail as any indignant bull ever was, or shall be.
Here he would take the husband from the wife, here the child from its mother, here the statesman from his duty, and here the toiler from his trouble.
At last, slumber came to Jim the slumber of the toiler, and early the next morning he was busy in feeding his helpers, who had a long day's walk before them. When, at last, they were all ferried over the river, and had started on their homeward way, Jim ascended to the cupola again, and waved his bandanna in farewell.
On every side were evidences of wealth and luxury. So Mentu labored because he loved to toil. In a land languorous with tropical inertia, an enthusiastic toiler is not common. For this reason, Mentu was worth particular attention. He towered a palm in height over his Egyptian brethren, and his massive frame was entirely in keeping with his majestic stature.
That was her first place, and from that time on she was a toiler, indoors and out, but mainly in the fields, till she was past eighty-five; seventy-five years of hard work then less and less as her wonderful strength diminished, and her sons and daughters were getting grey, until now at the age of ninety-four she does very little practically nothing.
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