echim,
"and he would no more do as Robert does than he would fly. He keeps
his workmen down in their place. Now Robert sells them land at a cheap
rate and encourages a building association amongst the workmen, so
most all of them own their own houses and gardens, and they cultivate
fruits and flowers, making their homes look more like a genteel,
wealthy person's than a laborer's; it makes them independent as you
please, heads right up, lookin' you right in the face, as if they wuz
your equals. Mudd-Weakdew don't let them own an inch of land; they
live in tenements that he owns and they pay high rents. The houses are
laborers' rooms, not genteel and comfortable as their employer's. He
says that he makes as much out of the rent of these houses as he does
from his factory, for I must say that Robert's workmen do more work
and better. But the Mudd-Weakdews live like a prince on a broad,
tree-shaded avenue with a long row of tenement houses on the alley
back of it, separated from the poor, and what I consider a genteel,
proper way.

"Of course his workmen complain that they do all the work and he lives
in a palace and they in a hovel, that he is burdened with luxuries and
is hoarding up millions, whilst they labor through their half-starved
lives and have the workhouse to look forward to. So unreasonable! How
can the poor expect the genteel pleasures of the wealthy, and when
their houses are low and old and the walls mouldy and streets narrow
and filthy and no gardens, and ten or fifteen in one room, they ought
not to expect the comfort and pure air of four people in one great
house set in a park. But such people can't reason."

"Who is the fourth?" sez I coldly, for I despised her idees.

"They have a little girl older than Augustus and very different from
him. Little Augustus is naturally very aristocratic and they encourage
him to look down on the tenement children and be sharp to them, for
they know that he will have to take the reins in his hands and control
rebellious workmen just as his pa does now, and conquer them just as
you would a ugly horse or dog."

"How is the little girl different?" sez I in cold, icy axents.

"Oh, she is a perfect beauty, older than Augustus and at boarding-school
now. She is the idol of their hearts--even the workmen love her, she
is so gentle and sweet. Her parents adore her and expect that she
will unite them to the nobility, for she is as beautiful as an angel.

"Little Augustus w