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They were naked save for a loin-cloth and the girdle to which were attached their brass powder flasks, shaped like a ram's horn, their silver cases for flint and steel, their daggers, and their thorn extractors, consisting of a picker and tweezers, fastened together.
Geordie was now fairly free from the uncongenial drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own inclinations in the direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he not earning the grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to eightpence a little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and serious work of driving the gin-horse?
The Slate Picker: The Story of a Boy's Life in the Coal Mines. By HARRY PRENTICE. 12mo, cloth, illustrated, price $1.00. This is a story of a boy's life in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. Ben Burton, the hero, had a hard road to travel, but by grit and energy he advanced step by step until he found himself called upon to fill the position of chief engineer of the Kohlnoor Coal Company.
By sunrise the chill begins to disappear, and a few brief moments is the only interval between piercing chill and midsummer heat. The baracan is quickly shed and the fez, if the picker is rich enough to possess one, is discarded for an esparto hat with rim of mammoth proportions. Esparto grass sandals protect his feet.
"Why, that's the boy that Art and I met on the road," whispered Harry to his companion as they were descending. "It is? Why, that is the first picker I was telling you of." "Oh!" said Harry in a tone of disappointment.
Where they couldn't reach by hand, they stood on barrels or ladders, and used a long handled picker, so as not to bruise the fruit.
"I don't know that I'd call him misguided," said Mr. Mortimer, as one desiring to be fair, "I think he's a right smart picker! She's such a corking girl, you know. We were children together, and I've loved her for years. Ten years at least. But you know how it is somehow one never seems to get in line for a proposal. I thought I saw an opening in the summer of nineteen-twelve, but it blew over.
Now he should have vent for his spite against the girl. "Thutty-six lashes on yer bar' back by yer sweet'art." Mr. Buck said this with a dreadful snicker in Little Lizay's face. The word ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth that Little Lizay, the famous picker, had fallen behind, and was to be flogged by the overseer, some said by Big Sam, others declared.
At his calls, the Baroness and Carp, also a rag picker who came into the field at that moment and a man with a push-cart who sold red and yellow and blue sugar sticks, ran up. "What's the matter?" demanded the Baroness. He filled the glass again and held it out to the donkey, who, as before, absorbed half of the contents amidst the laughter and shouts of those who looked on.
Evidently here was a man not posing, a hero because his character was heroic, a genuine personage not artificial, proclamatory, a picker of phrases, but a doer of deeds that explain themselves; a man with imagination, not fantastic but realistic, who must have had a vision during the night after the May-day battle of what might be the great hereafter; beholding under the southern constellations the gigantic shadow of America, crowned with stars, with the archipelagoes of Asia under her feet and broad and mighty destinies at command.
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