“How grand that is!” said Tracy, as he
wended homeward. “What a civilization
it is, and what prodigious results these are! and brought
about almost wholly by common men; not by Oxford-trained
aristocrats, but men who stand shoulder to shoulder
in the humble ranks of life and earn the bread that
they eat. Again, I’m glad I came.
I have found a country at last where one may start
fair, and breast to breast with his fellow man, rise
by his own efforts, and be something in the world and
be proud of that something; not be something created
by an ancestor three hundred years ago.”
CHAPTER XI.
During the first few days he kept the fact diligently
before his mind that he was in a land where there
was “work and bread for all.” In
fact, for convenience’ sake he fitted it to
a little tune and hummed it to himself; but as time
wore on the fact itself began to take on a doubtful
look, and next the tune got fatigued and presently
ran down and stopped. His first effort was to
get an upper clerkship in one of the departments,
where his Oxford education could come into play and
do him service. But he stood no chance whatever.
There, competency was no recommendation; political
backing, without competency, was worth six of it.
He was glaringly English, and that was necessarily
against him in the political centre of a nation where
both parties prayed for the Irish cause on the house-top
and blasphemed it in the cellar. By his dress
he was a cowboy; that won him respect—when
his back was not turned—but it couldn’t
get a clerkship for him. But he had said, in
a rash moment, that he would wear those clothes till
the owner or the owner’s friends caught sight
of them and asked for that money, and his conscience
would not let him retire from that engagement now.
At the end of a week things were beginning to wear
rather a startling look. He had hunted everywhere
for work, descending gradually the scale of quality,
until apparently he had sued for all the various kinds
of work a man without a special calling might hope
to be able to do, except ditching and the other coarse
manual sorts—and had got neither work nor
the promise of it.
He was mechanically turning over the leaves of his
diary, meanwhile, and now his eye fell upon the first
record made after he was burnt out:
“I myself did not doubt my stamina before, nobody
could doubt it now, if they could see how I am housed,
and realise that I feel absolutely no disgust with
these quarters, but am as serenely content with them
as any dog would be in a similar kennel. Terms,
twenty-five dollars a week. I said I would start
at the bottom. I have kept my word.”
A shudder went quaking through him, and he exclaimed:
“What have I been thinking of! This the
bottom! Mooning along a whole week, and these
terrific expenses climbing and climbing all the time!
I must end this folly straightway.”
Copyrights
The American Claimant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
