mmie, his faithful henchmen, were
each between forty and fifty, if they were a day--poor, gnarled, dusty,
storm-tossed Italians who had come from heaven knows where, had endured
God knows what, and were now rounding out a work-a-day existence under
the sheltering wing of this same Rourke, a great and protecting power to
them.

This same Matt was a funny little Italian, soft of voice and gentle of
manner, whom Rourke liked very much, but with whom he loved to quarrel.
He would go down in any hole where the latter was working, and almost
invariably shortly after you would hear the most amazing uproar issuing
therefrom, shouts of: "Put it here, I say! Put it here! Down with it!
Here! Here! Jasus Christ, have ye no sinse at aall?"--coupled, of
course, with occasional guttural growls from Matt, who was by no means
in awe of his master and who feared no personal blows. The latter had
been with Rourke for so long that he was not in the least overawed by
his yelling and could afford to take such liberties. Occasionally, not
always, Rourke would come climbing out of the hole, his face and neck
fairly scarlet with heat, raging and shouting, "I'll get shut av ye!
I'll have no more thruck with ye, ye blitherin', crazy loon! What good
arre ye? What work can ye do? Naathin'! Naathin'! I'll be shut av ye
now, an' thin maybe I'll have a little p'ace." Then he would dance
around and threaten and growl until something else would take his
attention, when he would quiet down and be as peaceful as ever. Somehow,
I always felt that in spite of all the difficulties involved, he enjoyed
these rows--must fight, in short, to be happy. Sometimes he would go
home without saying a word to Matt, a conclusion which at first I
imagined portended the end of the latter, but soon I came to know
better. For the next morning Matt would reappear as unconcernedly as
though nothing had happened, and Rourke would appear not to notice or
remember.

Once, anent all this, I said to him, "Rourke, how many times have you
threatened to discharge Matt in the last three years?"

"Shewer," he replied, with his ingratiating grin, "a man don't mane aall
he says aall the time."

The most humorous of all his collection of workingmen, however, was the
aforementioned Jimmie, a dark, mild-eyed, soft-spoken Calabrian, who had
the shrewdness of a Machiavelli and the pertness of a crow. He lived in
the same neighborhood as Rourke, far out in one of those small towns on
the