all men respect and have consecrated:  one of the sacred band, doing the needful, but irksome drudgery.  Indeed, I felt a slight reproach, because I observed this from the window, and was not abroad and stirring about a similar business.  The day went by, and at evening I passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster’s labor, in my eyes.  In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.  I may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.  To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.  If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.  If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.  Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render.  You are paid for being something less than a man.  The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely.  Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty.  He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.  As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want.  They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough.  When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.  I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly,—­that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends.  Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.