In another three weeks the work was really given him to do, and then began one of the finest exhibitions of Irish domination and self-sufficiency that I have ever witnessed.  We moved to Mott Haven Yard, a great network of tracks and buildings, in the center of which this new building was to be erected.  Rourke was given a large force of men, whom he fairly gloried in bossing.  He had as many as forty Italians, to say nothing of a number of pseudo-carpenters and masons (not those shrewd hawks clever enough to belong to the union, but wasters and failures of another type) who did the preliminary work of digging for the foundation, etc.  Handling these, Rourke was in his element.  He loved to see so much brisk work going on.  He would trot to and fro about the place, beaming in the most angelic fashion, and shouting orders that could be heard all over the neighborhood.  It was delicious to watch him.  At times he would stand by the long trenches where the men were digging for the foundation, a great line of them, their backs bent over their work, and rub his hands in pleasingly human satisfaction, saying, “We’re goin’ along fine, Teddy.  I can jist see me way to the top av the buildin’,” and then he would proceed to harass and annoy his men out of pure exuberance of spirits.

“Ye waant to dig it so, man,” or, “Ye don’t handle yer pick right; can’t ye see that?  Hold it this way.”  Sometimes he would get down in the trench and demonstrate just how it was to be done, a thing which greatly amused some of the workmen.  Frequently he would exhibit to me little tricks or knacks of his trade, such as throwing a trowel ten feet so that it would stick in a piece of wood; turning a shovel over with a lump of dirt on it and not dropping the lump, and similar simple acts, always adding, “Ye’ll niver be a mason till ye can do that.”

When he was tired of fussing with the men outside he would come around to the little wooden shed, where I was keeping the mass of orders and reports in shape and getting his material ready for him, and look over the papers in the most knowing manner.  When he had satisfied himself that everything was going right, he would exclaim, “Ye’re jist the b’y fer the place, Teddy.  Ye’d made a good bookkeeper.  If ever I get to be Prisident, I’ll make ye me Sicretary av State.”

But the thing which really interested and enthralled Rourke was the coming of the masons—­those hardy buccaneers of the laboring world who come and go as they please, asking no favors and brooking no interference.  Plainly he envied them their reckless independence at the same time that he desired to control their labor in his favor—­a task worthy of the shrewdest diplomat.  Never in my life have I seen such a gay, ruthless, inconsiderate point of view as these same union masons represented, a most astounding lot.  They were—­are, I suppose I should say—­our modern buccaneers and Captain Kidds of the laboring world, demanding, if