Now that he stood and refilled his pipe from a tobacco box nailed just inside the door, I saw him as in a picture-frame. He had powerful but slanting shoulders. He was so tall he must needs stoop to avoid the lintel. With his bent neck, he looked as though he could hold up a mine caving in. His general outlines seemed to be hewn from fence-rails, then hung with grotesque muscles of loose leather. His eyebrows were grown together. From looking down long passageways his eyes were marvellously owl-like. He was cadaverous. He had a beak nose. He had a retreating chin but, breaking the rules of phrenology, he managed to convey the impression of a driving personality. He looked like an enormous pick-axe. He calmly commented: “Them Polacks waste powder awful. Not only on Sunday, for fun, but down in the mine they use twice too much. And they can’t blast the hardest coal, either.... And they’re always gettin’ careless and blowin’ themselves to hell and everybody else. It’s awful, it’s awful,” he said, but in a most philosophic tone. He lowered his voice and pointed with his pipe stem: “Them people that live in the next house are supposed to be Cawcasians, but they haven’t a marriage license. They let their little girl go for beer this afternoon, for them fellows explodin’ powder over there. ’Taint no way to raise a child. That child’s mother was a well-behaved Methodist till she married a Polack, and had four children, and he died, and they died, and some say she poisoned them all. Now she’s got this child by this no-account white man. They live without a license, like birds. Yet they eat off weddin’s.” “Eat off weddings?” “Yes,” he said. “These Bohunks and Lickerishes all have one kind of a wedding. It lasts three days and everybody comes. The best man is king. He bosses the plates.” “Bosses the plates?” “Yes. They buy a lot of cheap plates. Every man that comes must break a plate with a dollar. The plate is put in the middle of the floor. He stands over it and bangs the dollar down. If he breaks the plate he gets to kiss and hug the bride. If he doesn’t break it, the young couple get that dollar. He must keep on givin’ them dollars in this way till he breaks the plate. Eats and plates and beer cost about fifty dollars. The young folks clear about two hundred dollars to start life on.” “And,” he continued, “the folks next door make a practice of eatin’ round at weddin’s without puttin’ down their dollars.” I began to feel guilty. “It’s a good deal like my begging supper and breakfast of you.” He hadn’t meant it that way. “No,” he said, “you’re takin’ the only way to see the country. Why, man, I used to travel like you, before I was married, except I didn’t take no book nor poetry nor nothin’, and wasn’t afeered of box-cars the way you are.... I been in every state in the Union but Maine. I don’t know how I kept out of there.... I’ve been nine years in this house. I don’t know but what I see as much as when I was on the go....