from any place. This exploit made me king fisherman that summer. I had suddenly become fa mous. I enjoyed the notoriety, because my boyish mind was filled then with that sort of thing. Of ambition, I had never thought. Of philanthropy, I had never learned that there was such a thing. Whether I was a sinner or not, I did not know, and did not care. I had never yet thought of giving a moral account of myself. No human demand of that kind had ever been made on me. I do not believe the good God had made any, for his reckoning with me came later on. I only knew that I loved fishing better than bread. The sport was a delight to me for its own sake. Call it what you will. Name it the remains of savagery, to which heredity clings-no difference. It is fun to fish when they bite. The lake containing these fish was artificial. The embankment that held it was a mile and a quarter in length, and of immense proportions. Five hundred Irishmen worked at it for more than a year. One contractor had the north end, and another the south end. During the time of the building of this dam, a strife arose between the contractors. The man on the south was paying seventy-five cents a day for able-bodied men. The man on the north was short of hands, and men. offered eighty cents, and soon got nearly all the The man on the south nursed his wrath two weeks, and offered eighty cents and a jigger of whisky. The north works were vacated. As a standing offer it took from him his imported help as fast as it would arrive. Whisky was the drawing card; but it cost the south contractor his life. In a drunken melée he was killed by one of his men. Then the northern man secured the whole job, and finished the dike without whisky. During the time of this whisky contract the Irish camp at night was an awful pandemonium. The one dram each day was a whet to the Irish appetite that afterwards knew no bounds. The night-camp was an inferno. Many a poor man lost his life in its drunken brawls. There being no burial-grounds near, it was their custom to take their dead comrades with them to the works each morning, and lay the body in the embankment, and before night it would be buried thirty feet deep in the earth of the great construction, there to await the resurrection morn. During the day these plodding builders would not forget to mention the virtues of the deceased. In place of a priest, their fulsome praises of the dead were made to answer for a funeral service. About the same things were said of each man; but they were put in terms strong enough to satisfy the living that splendid things would be said of them, if any one of them should be killed, and as like as any by the very man who might swing the club to crack his brain. Next day after Jimmy was killed in the "Irish dance," the men would put his wheelbarrow where they could all pass by it, and each man paid his respects to the memory of the dead. "Poor Jimmy!" "Jimmy was a good boy, Jimmy was." "Jimmy was a game man, but he had bad luck last night." "Jimmy was a foine man with a shovel, Jimmy was. No man on the works could hold a candle to Jimmy. The works will suffer, the works will suffer." "Jimmy was as plucky a man as ever yese see. He would pick his man at the drop of a hat." "Yes, poor Jimmy was too free that way. So he is dead to-day." "But Jimmy was a good Catholic. He had no priest to shrive his soul; but the Holy Mary will be merciful to Jimmy when she knows the grit in the man.” In the course of a few years this lake filled with the myriad life of the finny tribe, and attracted idlers to its banks for an easy living. |