il-keg philosopher; just emerging
from ignorance and materialism into the realm of reflective experience.

He has at his tongue's end all the platitudes of the socialist and
possesses the knack of picking platitude and imperfect statistic to fit
his theories, whenever he finds a victim.

He does not look upon our government as a government of the people; but
a government of the few, who fool all the people all the time.

He is a firm believer in organized labor and the disorganization of
everything else, particularly capital. He believes in the equal
distribution of property every few years and that the masses should
throw off the yoke, but can neither identify nor define the yoke.

Until I heard him talk, in my inexperience, I thought that the world was
a reasonably comfortable place in which to live, in fact, I knew no
better. We were getting ten cents for tobacco, eighty cents for wheat,
fifty cents for corn, five cents for hogs and ten cents a pound for
turkeys. We heard no talk of hard times except just before a
presidential election.

We paid fifteen dollars per month for farm hands, three dollars a week
to the cook; we bought sugar for six cents and flour for five fifty a
barrel. We were paying the boss carpenter and chief representative of
organized labor three dollars a day, and fifteen dollars per thousand
for clear heart yellow pine lumber.

Hawkwood, the carpenter, spoke of the ideals of labor and how he would
fight for them through this and other lives until his words, to my
conservative and immature mind, seemed threats against organized
society.

My views, in the main, he called old-fashioned. I believed a laborer who
was thrifty, efficient and industrious did not need a union to help him,
arguing the union only helped the inefficient, lazy and profligate.

I tried several times to get him to rest on the springhouse slab or
dream couch, but his mind and temperament were too nervously active.

On Sunday he expected to go to Lexington for the day, but at train time
a heavy shower caused him to abandon the trip. I asked him to go to Pine
Grove church, but he very emphatically declined.

At dinner, with malice aforethought, I kept his plate heaped up and
repeatedly filled his goblet with ice-cooled buttermilk. After dinner as
it was a very warm day, I suggested we go to the springhouse and read,
and from the library got for him Fox's "Lives of The Martyrs."

I took the lead and appropriated the ru