The German and the Irishman fell to lifting stones to one side of the desired opening and I to the other. Every condition favored us. We had a definite task and not a difficult one, and no one to watch us at our work, nor drive us in its doing. The clouds had disappeared, and in the soft spring sunshine, with the bushes blossoming about us and the air full of the sounds of multiform labor, there was every stimulus to energetic effort for four hours. Not that the hours seemed short--they never do, I am convinced, even to well-seasoned unskilled workmen--but the difference between four hours of manual labor at a stretch and five is enormous, and to see my _confrères_ quite as impatient of their flight, even under these most favoring conditions, and to mark that the sober business of their lives was still an abhorrent drudgery to be shirked if possible, led the way to very sad reflection. Neither of them paid any attention to me until, late in the afternoon, there came a lull in their talk and I heard the Irishman’s call. “Hey, John!” “Hello,” I said. “Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?” I told him that I had not thought of it. “Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.” “What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?” he continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way. “You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and they don’t think any the better of you. Take it easy, man, take it easy; there’s time enough.” He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones, and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it, and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me. At a quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.