This started a yarn from Seth and he fixed his on Jim. They were full of these stories and would stop work a dozen times a day to drawl them out. Seth said that a man who lived on the edge of the town had a wife who was a mighty good cook. One spring she planned to go away for a week and visit some relatives but before going she cooked up enough food to last her husband a week. He was a hearty eater, so she spent three or four days at the task. When it came time for supper, the first day she left, the man felt so lonesome that he went out of the house and looked for someone to join him. He met Jim and asked him in. Jim said that he had just had supper and wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, but that he would join in a cup of tea just to be sociable. He sat down at the table and ate up a two quart pot of beans and the man brought on a second pot. Jim ate that too. Then the man brought out a pie and Jim ate that. A second one followed, and to cut a long story short, Jim before he finished ate up every single thing there was in the house. His host didn’t say anything until Jim rose from the table. “Well,” said his host, “I’m glad you didn’t come along when you were hungry.” I had more trouble handling those three men than I’ve ever had with a gang of a hundred foreign laborers. They didn’t know enough to do the work properly by themselves and they knew too much to obey orders. When it came to straightening up the underpinning I let them go ahead for a while on their own responsibility. This was a simple task which three men with crow bars ought to have done in half a day. At the end of the first half day they had succeeded in harmonizing their various opinions as to how it ought to be done to the point where they determined they needed a jack screw. One of them went off to borrow this and when he returned it was lunch time. Then I took hold and it was only by doing most of the work myself that we finished this job in two days. I used them to help only where I needed more muscle and at that the three together couldn’t lift as much as one of my stocky, close-knit Italian laborers. I found it impossible either to lead or drive them. My attempts resulted in nothing but longwinded arguments or sulky threats of leaving. And I was paying them a dollar and seventy-five cents a day for unskilled labor. They were both lazy and incompetent. That’s the frank truth. I kept them along until the fourth day, which was cloudy with at times a light drizzling rain. I had got up at four o’clock in order to be at the house on time, for I was anxious to get this outside work done as soon as possible. At seven o’clock not one of the men had put in an appearance. I waited until half past eight and then went off to see what the trouble was. I found Seth at home smoking a pipe by the side of the kitchen stove. His wife was a pleasant faced woman and the inside of the house was as neat as wax--in marked contrast to the clutter around the outside.