"But I know!" the mason exclaimed with rising excitement. "I've seen it over and over, everywhere. I've seen it in my own family," he said in a burst of bitter confidence. "There were eight of us and we were only middling poor until father died. The old man was a carpenter, up north in Sacramento County. He had a small place outside of town and we raised some stuff. But he got sick and died, when he weren't forty, and mother had the whole eight of us on her hands. I was just twelve and my oldest brother fifteen,--he was the only one could earn a dollar. We got on somehow, those that lived. Two of my sisters are married to farmers and there's another--well, she's the other thing." He stopped to look belligerently at Adelle as if she had somehow to do with it. "She was married to a workingman, good enough, I guess, but he got out of work and heard of something up north and never came back.... We boys scattered around where we could get work. Two of us is married and got families. Guess they wish often enough they hadn't, too!" Adelle was absorbed by the mason's personal statement. She had forgotten by this time her first self-consciousness in talking to the discharged workman, and he, too, seemed less truculent, as if he enjoyed letting off steam and stating his point of view to his ex-employer. "How old are you?" Adelle asked. "Twenty-eight," the mason replied. That was only a few years older than Adelle herself, but she recognized that the man's experience of living had been far more than hers, also deeper, so that he was justified in having opinions on the serious things of life. Wealth, she might think, was not the only road to "a full life" so much talked of in her circle. "Have you always been a stone mason?" she wanted to know. "Pretty much ever since I could lift a stone. An old feller took me from mother to work for my keep when I was fourteen. He used to do some mason work, and he knew how to lay stone--none better! He learned his trade back East where he come from. He was one of the real forty-niners, and knew my grandfather's folks--they all came to California the same time.... I've been all over this country, up and down the Coast, to Alasky and over in Nevada, at Carson City; drilling for oil, too, south. Oh, I've seen things," he mused complacently, puffing at his pipe and scratching his bare arms that were as smooth and brown as fine bronze. "And I tell you there ain't much in it for the laboring-man, no matter what wages he gets, unless he's got extry luck, which most of 'em ain't. No wonder he goes after booze when he has the chance. What's there in it for him anyhow?" Adelle, who had not been educated to philanthropy and social service, did not attempt to answer this difficult question.