The rest of the burg spent many anxious hours speculating upon the probable location of Fairman’s residential quarters in the Hereafter. Grabit thought of his employes in terms of machinery and was a devoted husband and father, according to custom. Fairman called his men his “helpers” and had the absurd notion that they were human. In Grabit’s mind there was not so much as a peewee doubt that he (i. e., Mr. Grabit) was a very superior order of genius and that every man under him was somewhere along about the mollusk stage of unfoldment. He felt that through Divine favor he was enabled to grant to his men the blessed concession of working 10 hours per diem for 8 hours payem. And he tucked his napkin under his chin and was very grateful. Fairman was so melon-brained that he imagined his manufactured products to be the result of the pooling of all the brains and activities of all the men in his plant from the General Manager down to the beetle that pinched the perfectos from the top desk-drawer. Grabit stroked his enameled brain-case and reasoned that by paying his men more wages they would only have that much more to squander down at the Big Horn. He figured that men of such muggy mentality didn’t care to spend any time in their dull homes, and so he couldn’t see any approximately sane reason for shortening working hours. Fairman had the comical delusion that by expanding wages and contracting the workday he could cut off a lot of worry from the minds of his laborers and their weary wives, and that this in turn would mean increased bodily vigor, clarity of thought, efficiency of action and other things that would sound well if we could think of them at this moment. With the recklessness of Irresponsibility, Fairman went so far as to put his spooly ideas into effect. He paid a minimum wage so high that when Grabit heard about it he let out a roar that shook the apples all off the trees in an orchard scene that his daughter, Eleanor, had painted when she was at the Academy. He swore that Fairman was demoralizing the Labor Market and nervously pulled scotch hairs out of his dilating nostrils. Time tangoed on. Visitors to the plant of Fairman began to comment on the clear merry eyes of the workers. The men went about their tasks with speed and accuracy. And whistled betimes. And sang, maybe. The factory’s output increased fifty percent without straining a ligament. The puddler seemed as interested as the President in everything that was doing around the Works. If you had stood on the corner when the morning whistles blew, and watched the dinner-pailers heading up Main Street, you could have picked the workers of Fairman from the toilers of Grabit with your eyes 22° off centre.