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Updated: August 11, 2024
The men who shoveled with their knives or plastered things on their forks as hod-carriers do mortar! The women who sucked in their soup, and the children who smeared their faces and licked their lips and slopped upon the table-cloth! The fat Dutchman who grunted when he ate, and then leaned back and panted! The yellow woman with the false teeth who gathered everything about her on the table!
It is the age of common sense, adjustment, and proportion. All of us ladies, gentlemen, women, men, Northerners, Southerners, lords, caitiffs, actors, hardware-drummers, senators, hod-carriers, and politicians are coming to a better understanding. Chivalry is one of our words that changes its meaning every day.
At last we floated into an uptown cafe that I knew by heart. When the hod-carriers' union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal kicker called out: "Six eleven forty-two nineteen twelve" to his men, and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port Arthur or Portsmouth. But old Jack wasn't working for the furniture and glass factories that night.
"I will," says Mike, "and I'll put it in the drawer next to the bills that was paid to the parson's daughter for kisses at the church fair to build a new parsonage for the parson's daughter to live in." At 1 o'clock when the hod-carriers were making ready to close up the front and keep the inside open, a woman slips in the door of the restaurant and comes up to Old Jack's table.
All Irish names have, leaving out Michael and Patrick and Cornelius and others applied solely to the creatures who don't take after their blessed mothers and who grow up to be policemen and hod-carriers, with once in awhile a lawyer or labour-leader to glorify the saints they were named for, and Yes, begorry, Doraine's her name."
Hod-carriers raced up swaying ladders, steam-winches puffed and snorted; great vats of lime and mortar blockaded the street. It was to have a great inner court upon which seven galleries would look down. Ralston boasted he would make it a hotel for travelers to talk of round the world. And no one in San Francisco doubted it.
Coal-heavers, hod-carriers, stock-speculators, riffraff, who possessed an ounce of brains and a pound of luck. Why, they didn't even know how to spend their money when they got it. But what could be expected of people who put iron dogs and wooden deers on their front lawns? But the Benningtons, the Haldenes, and the Winterflelds, and the Parkers, they had something to brag about.
"Truth! Bah!" he exclaimed excitedly. "I have no patience with such aesthetic hod-carriers! Truth, indeed! Is there no other truth in art but that coarse verisimilitude, that vulgar trickery, which appeals to the eyes and the ears of the rabble? Are there not psychological truths of immensely greater importance?
The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses as they worked.
In such discussions the points which impress the more ordinary and less far-sighted members are sure to have great value; especially when we bear in mind that the object of such an assembly is not merely to elaborate a plan, but to get the great mass of people, including the brick-layers and hod-carriers, to understand it well enough to vote for it.
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