The clerks were intent upon playing practical
jokes which pleased the farm hands immensely. While one of them talked
loudly of his skill in his work a clerk crept out at the door of one of the
stores and approached him. He held a pin in his hand and with it jabbed
the talker in the back. The crowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the
victim became angry a quarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other
men came to join the party and the joke was told to them. "Well, you should
have seen the look on his face. I thought I would die," one of the
bystanders declared.
Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns
and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a
section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one
compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides
of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that
did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by
farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men
worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their
minds reached out toward the solution of the mystery of existence. The
schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom Paine's "Age of Reason"
and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussed these books with their
fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, that America had something
real and spiritual to offer to the rest of the world.
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