The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of HimFord, Paul Leicester
General
The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him
Ford, Paul Leicester
Labor movement -- Fiction; Love stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Political fiction; Tenement houses -- Fiction
Peter felt a thrill of pleasure pass through him, but he did not show
it. “Let me tell you something in connection with that. A high light in
place of a dark shadow. There was an attempt to convict some of the
strikers, but it failed, for want of positive evidence. The moral
proof, however, against a fellow named Connelly was so strong that
there could be no doubt that he was guilty. Two years later that man
started out in charge of a long express, up a seven-mile grade, where
one of our railroads crosses the Alleghanies. By the lay of the land
every inch of that seven miles of track can be seen throughout its
entire length, and when he had pulled half way up, he saw a section of
a freight train coming down the grade at a tremendous speed. A coupling
had broken, and this part of the train was without a man to put on the
brakes. To go on was death. To stand still was the same. No speed which
he could give his train by backing would enable it to escape those
uncontrolled cars. He sent his fireman back to the first car, with
orders to uncouple the engine. He whistled ‘on brakes’ to his train, so
that it should be held on the grade safely. And he, and the engine
alone, went on up that grade, and met that flying mass of freight. He
saved two hundred people’s lives. Yet that man, two years before, had
tried to burn alive forty of his fellow-men. Was that man good or bad?”
“Really, chum, if you ask it as a conundrum, I give it up. But there
are thoroughly and wholly good things in this world, and one of them is
this stuffing. Would it be possible for a fellow to have a second
help?”
Peter smiled. “Jenifer always makes the portions according to what is
to follow, and I don’t believe he’ll think you had better. Jenifer, can
Mr. D’Alloi have some more stuffing?”
“Yissah,” said Jenifer, grinning the true darkey grin, “if de gentmun
want’t sell his ap’tite foh a mess ob potash.”
“Never mind,” said Watts. “I’m not a dyspeptic, and so don’t need
potash. But you might wrap the rest up in a piece of newspaper, and
I’ll take it home.”
“Peter, you must have met a great many men in politics whom you knew to
be dishonest?” said Mrs. D’Alloi.
“No. I have known few men whom I could call dishonest. But then I make
a great distinction between the doer of a dishonest act and a dishonest
man.”
“That is what the English call ‘a fine-spun’ distinction, I think,”
said madame.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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