“You fool, don’t you know better than
to be throwing stones at the bar?” Al roared,
and with an oath discharged him.
One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting
in a little park in the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing
town watching men and women going through the quiet
streets to the factories and striving to overcome a
feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the
evening before. He had come into town over a
poorly made clay road running through barren hills,
and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of
a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed
along the edges of the town.
Before him in the distance he had looked into the
windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which
added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him.
Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers
ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the
glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another
of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters
that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated
him. Looking closely at the racing waters his
head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in
fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly
the small tree against which he leaned. In the
back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and
facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board
fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly
fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before
him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought
each other. Again and again they sprang into the
fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming
exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among
the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little
recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam
had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from
the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching
forth its black smoke. He had thought that the
two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless
struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised
much of man’s struggle in the world, and, turning,
had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel,
feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the
little park, with the early morning sun shining down
through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red
leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of
depression that had clung to him through the night.
A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching
the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.
“On the road, brother?” he asked.
Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.
“Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly,
pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk.
“See them going like beasts to their bondage?
What do they get for it? What kind of lives do
they lead? The lives of dogs.”
He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he
had voiced.
