The workmen at Highcourt were of the nondescript labor army that America has recruited. For the rougher outside work there were a number of Italians, whom Adelle liked to entertain with her tourist Italian. There were also a few Greeks and Slavs who had got into this kind of work from other occupations. Inside the house the carpenters, painters, and plumbers were Swedes, Finns, Germans, one Englishman--no one who might justly be described as a native American. It was a typical instance of the way in which all the hard, rough labor of the country was being done, from building railroads to getting out the timber from the forests or making shoes and blankets in the factories. Hard physical labor was no longer performed to any extent by native Americans. Contractors everywhere recruited their polyglot companies in the great cities and shipped them out into the country where there was a demand. The men employed at Highcourt were thus obtained in San Francisco by the head contractor and merely boarded in the town of Bellevue. They lived "across the tracks" in the labor settlement, or in lath and tar-paper shacks about the hills, camping in their eternal campaign of day labor wherever the job happened to take them. Few were married, and all were given more or less to drink and riotous living when pay-day came; and of course they were constantly changing jobs. Adelle often heard the architect and the head contractor deplore the conditions of the labor market and the poor quality of work to be got out of the men at ruinous wages. She had also heard her neighbors, Carter Pound and Nelson Carhart, speak feelingly about the "foreign riff-raff" they had to employ on their estates. No workman had a conscience these days, they said. The women, too, talked of the rowdy character of the town "across the tracks," and the unsafety of the roads for women. Adelle did not think much about the matter, accepting it as a necessity, like gnats or drought or flood. The Italians at least stuck to their jobs and were good-natured. Adelle always said "bon giorno" when she ran across them toiling up the slippery paths with their loads of stone or cement. She liked the way in which they showed their teeth and touched their hats politely to "la signora." They had a feeling for her as the mistress of the house, a latent sense of feudal loyalty to their employer that had quite disappeared among the other workmen. Apart from the Italians, the faces of the men upon the job were not familiar to her and were constantly changing, a strange one appearing almost every day. So Adelle felt less at home with them and rarely spoke to them unless she had an order to give that she could not easily transmit through the foreman.