l that was left
outside of that. I therefore explained as best I could the sad plight of
the chief clerk, who stood in danger of losing his job unless these
things came in promptly.

"You see how it is, Rourke, don't you?" I pleaded.

He seemed to see, but he was still angry.

"An o.k. blank! An o.k. blank!" he echoed contentiously, but in a
somewhat more conciliatory spirit. "He wants an o.k. blank, does he?
Well, I expect ye might as well give thim to him, thin. I think the man
lives on thim things, the way he's aalways caallin' fer thim. Ye'd think
I was a bookkeeper an' foreman at the same time; it's somethin' aaful.
An o.k. blank! An o.k. blank!" and he sputtered to silence.

A little while later he humorously explained that he had "clane forgot
thim, anyhow."

The ensuing month was a busy one for us. We had a platform to lay at
Morrisania, a chimney to build at Tarrytown, a sidewalk to lay at White
Plains, and a large cistern to dig and wall in at Tuckahoe. Besides
these, there were platforms to build at Van Cortlandt and Mount Kisco,
water-towers at Highbridge and Ardsley, a sidewalk and drain at Caryl, a
culvert and an ash-pit at Bronx Park, and some forty concrete piers for
a building at Melrose--all of which required any amount of running and
figuring, to say nothing of the actual work of superintending and
constructing, which Rourke alone could look after. It seemed ridiculous
to me at the time that any one doing all this hard practical labor
should not be provided with a clerk or an accountant to take at least
some of this endless figuring off his hands. At the same time, if he had
been the least bit clever, he could have provided himself with one
permanently by turning one of his so-called laborers into a
clerk--carrying a clerk as a laborer--but plainly it had never occurred
to him. He depended on his family. The preliminary labor alone of
ordering and seeing that the material was duly shipped and unloaded was
one man's work; and yet Rourke was expected to do it all.

In spite of all this, however, he displayed himself a masterful worker.
I have never seen a better. He preferred to superintend, of course, to
get down into the pit or up on the wall, and measure and direct. At the
same time, when necessary to expedite a difficult task, he would toil
for hours at a stretch with his trowel and his line and his level and
his plumb-bob, getting the work into shape, and you would never hear a
personal comp