Having a time limit ever before their pestered eyes, it sorely irked the contractors that, whereas five hundred black, brown and yellow men might drop their tools Saturday night at six o'clock, a scant two hundred or so answered when the seven-o'clock whistle blew on Monday morning. The others came straggling back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even on Thursday, depending on how long their wages held out. “Whut I wants to go to work fur, Mist' W'ite Man? I got 'most two dollars lef.' Come round to see me w'en all dat's done spent and mebbe we kin talk bus'ness 'en.” The above statement, made by a truant grading hand to an inquiring grading boss, was typical of a fairly common point of view on the side of Labour. And this one, below, which sprang from the exasperated soul of a visiting contractor, was just as typical, for it was the cry of outraged Capital: “It takes two white men, standing over every black man, to make the black man work--and then he won't! I never was a Southern sympathiser before, but I am now--you bet!” The camel's back broke entirely at the end of the third week. It was a green paymaster from the Chicago offices who furnished the last straw. He tried to pay off with paper money. Since those early postbellum days, when the black brother, being newly freed from servitude and innocently devoid of the commercial instinct, thought the white man's money, whether stamped on metal disks or printed on parchment rectangulars, was always good money, and so accepted much Confederate currency, to his sorrow at the time and to his subsequent enlightenment, he has nourished a deep suspicion of all cash except the kind that jingles; in fact, it is rarely that he will accept any other sort. Give him the hard round silver and he is well-content. That is good money--money fit to buy things with. He knows it is, because it rattles in the pocket and it rings on the bar; but for him no greenbacks, if you please. So when this poor ignorant paymaster opened up his satchel and spread out his ones and his twos, his fives and his tens, his treasury certificates and his national bank notes, there was a riot. Then the contractors just fired the whole outfit bodily; and they suspended operations, leaving the fills half-filled and the cuts half-dug until they could fetch new shifts of labourers from the North. They fetched them--a trainload of overalled Latins, and some of these were tall and swarthy men, and more were short, fair men; but all were capable of doing a full day's work.