"I rarely sleep in the daytime; but today the cool subdued light and quiet of the springhouse was responsible for a lapse. "Having in mind to prepare a sermon on faith and the resurrection, and thinking of certain of Paul's letters in connection therewith, my dream thoughts were so assembled that while I slept I seemed to hear Paul preaching from the altar in the catacombs on that identical subject." RICHARD HAWKWOOD. I am home from the University of Virginia, having completed the law course. The restful peace of the old farmhouse is most enjoyable; but there is another blemish upon the landscape; my father is building a second tobacco barn, and the foreman in charge, a union carpenter, or nine-hour man, as we then called him, is a disturbing element, spending his time, when not at work, chewing tobacco and aggressively talking about the rights of labor and the danger to the world of concentrated wealth. When thus engaged he is a typical nail-keg philosopher; just emerging from ignorance and materialism into the realm of reflective experience. He has at his tongue's end all the platitudes of the socialist and possesses the knack of picking platitude and imperfect statistic to fit his theories, whenever he finds a victim. He does not look upon our government as a government of the people; but a government of the few, who fool all the people all the time. He is a firm believer in organized labor and the disorganization of everything else, particularly capital. He believes in the equal distribution of property every few years and that the masses should throw off the yoke, but can neither identify nor define the yoke. Until I heard him talk, in my inexperience, I thought that the world was a reasonably comfortable place in which to live, in fact, I knew no better. We were getting ten cents for tobacco, eighty cents for wheat, fifty cents for corn, five cents for hogs and ten cents a pound for turkeys. We heard no talk of hard times except just before a presidential election. We paid fifteen dollars per month for farm hands, three dollars a week to the cook; we bought sugar for six cents and flour for five fifty a barrel. We were paying the boss carpenter and chief representative of organized labor three dollars a day, and fifteen dollars per thousand for clear heart yellow pine lumber. Hawkwood, the carpenter, spoke of the ideals of labor and how he would fight for them through this and other lives until his words, to my conservative and immature mind, seemed threats against organized society. My views, in the main, he called old-fashioned. I believed a laborer who was thrifty, efficient and industrious did not need a union to help him, arguing the union only helped the inefficient, lazy and profligate. I tried several times to get him to rest on the springhouse slab or dream couch, but his mind and temperament were too nervously active.