The toil of the laborer is artless. There is in it neither form, nor color, nor tone. For months I have been working as only workingmen work, and in the dreary round of the hours it has come to me that the thing which is wearisome and disheartening about it is that it is utterly devoid of art. In the construction of a building, for instance, whereat we labored for three long months, I discovered that with each day’s labor I was in contact only with that which was formless and colorless and toneless. Huge, misshapen, disheartening piles of brick; commonplace, indifferent and colorless masses of stone, wood, iron, sand, cement; bone and sinew of what was to be, but in themselves devoid of all that could appeal to the eye or touch the heart, and scattered about in such an aimless way as to bring to the mind nothing but a wearying sense of disorder. This disorder, however, as soon became clear to me, was not apparent in a definite way to all those who worked amidst it. These mixers of mortar and carriers of brick toiled in the grime and dust without seeming to realize that it was a wretched condition, hard, grim and, so far as the sum of their individual lives was concerned, but meagerly profitable. Carpenters, masons and iron-workers went sturdily about their labors, but the artless and unlovely nature of their work was over it all, and despite their seeming unconsciousness to it one felt the drag of its absence, their eagerness to get away, their innate yearning to be where things were not in the making, the urge to be out in the larger and more perfect world where form and color and tone do abound. For, after all, in the main, things do stand complete, as we see them. The hills have their enduring roundness, the trees their perpetual forms. Landscapes and skylines are not torn and scraped as in the vicinity of some (comparatively) minute constructive labor. Nature is nearly always cunningly pleasing to the eye on the surface, whatever may go on below, whereas the average constructive processes are so often discordant, broken, disordered. Seeing this, and not being able in my own consciousness to explain why, my heart was sad and I wondered why life should be thus grimly organized; why formlessness in the parts of the thing to be formed; why tonelessness in that which when laboriously organized would be all tone; why colorlessness in that which in the end would enliven the heart with color and dance before the eye a perfect thing.