It was not worth while to explain that Wall Street is not a residence quarter, but the statement had an interest of its own, and so I probed the boss for what lay under it. There was nothing, apparently, beyond a vague sense of injustice which had bred a feeling of hatred for a class that the Free Silver agitation had taught him to call “money lords.” These were a company of men who had got control of the “money market” and lived, consequently, in much splendor, in Wall Street, at the expense of the “producing classes,” which appeared to consist solely of those who work with their hands on their own account or for day’s wages. The idea would have been not in the least surprising had it come from a fellow-laborer in a town, where some wave of well-defined revolutionary agitation might have touched him, but coming from a native-born farmer’s son, grown to a section-boss, it served to deepen the wonder that one felt in finding so often among an agrarian population the beginnings of revolutionary doctrine. Sullivan did not share the boss’s views. “Money lords” and “the producing classes” were but idle words to him. Life was a matter of working or loafing. If you labored with your hands, yours was the bondage of work; if not, you had escaped the primal curse. His philosophy was luminous in a single sentence while we were at work in the afternoon. It was late in the day, but still very hot, for the clouds had melted in the morning and the sun gained in strength as the day passed, and no breeze came to stir the sweltering air. We were employed now near the eastern end of the section, where some regrading was necessary because of weakening in the road-bed. Sullivan and I were together as before. It was pick and shovel labor, and, because of some earlier experience, I did not need much coaching, so that we were working in silence for the most part, except that Sullivan now and then would burst into song. But his snatches of song grew rarer as the afternoon wore away and as the muscles in our backs protested the more against the continued strain. With leaden feet the minutes plodded slowly past, sixty minutes to the hour and five hours of unbroken toil. Like Joshua’s moon at Ajalon, the sun seemed to stand at gaze, and, from the mid-western sky, transfixed us with his heat. Five o’clock came, and the next hour stretched before us in almost intolerable length. For some time Sullivan had been silent, drudging doggedly on. Now, I saw him draw himself slowly erect, rubbing with one hand, meanwhile, the small of his back, while his face expressed comically the pain he felt, and then he said, and I wish that I could suggest the rich Irish brogue with which he said it: “Ach, I’m that sorry that I didn’t study for the ministry.”