epresenting in turn all
sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and
misfortunes. But lord, it was only just words, words--they meant
nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled.
Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have
suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to
describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and
complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves
that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than
a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much
bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they
know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know
all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money
enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days,
but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as
near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.

Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation,
and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect,
engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate,
legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven
when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow
in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the
ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why,
certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord,
it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly
unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher
the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall
be his pay in cash, also. And it's also the very law of those
transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE SMALLPOX HUT

When we arrived at that hut at mid-afternoon, we saw no signs
of life about it. The field near by had been denuded of its crop
some time before, and had a skinned look, so exhaustively had
it been harvested and gleaned. Fences, sheds, everything had a
ruined look, and were eloquent of poverty. No animal was around
anywhere, no living thing in sight. The stillness was awful, it
was like the stillness of death. The cabin was a one-story one,
whose thatch was black with age, and ragged from lack of repair.

The door stood a trifle ajar. We approached it stealthily--on tiptoe
and at half-breath