Hard Graft.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 9187, 21 October 1898, Page 2

Hard Graft.

Hard graft may be “ nothing when you are used to it,” but it remains hard graft all the same. But what it really is has very seldom been described as it deserves to be. An attempt in this direction has been made by an American, who gave up a college professorship of social science, to make an “ experiment in reality,” and went to work as a casual, unskilled, labourer at a variety of jobs—factory work, navvying, bush logging, farm work, hotel porter, book-hawking, and tramping. The following are passages from his experiences as a navvy:— A, large building had been reduced to a heap of debris hy dynamite, and the amateur labourer found wotk as one of the gang of men who were clearing the ruins. There were about sixty of them, in the gang when the day’s work began. “ Men were loosening the ruined mass with their picks, and urging their crowbars between the blocks of stone, and shovelling the finer refuse into carts, and loading the coarser fragments with their hands. The gang boss, mounted upon a section of the wall, began to direct the

work before him. A cart had been driven among the ruins, and he called three of us to load it with the jagged masonry that lay heaped about it. It was too coarse to be handled with shovels, and we went at it with our hand.-. They were soon bleeding from contact with the sharp edges of. the rock; but the dust, acted as a styptic abd helped vastly in the hardening process. . , In a harsh resonant voice the boss was shouting his orders over our heads to the farthermost portion of the works. His short, thick-set, muscular figure seemed rooted to the masonry on which he stood. His restless grey eyes were everywhere at once, and his whole personality was tense with a compelling, physical energy.” Tne boss swore and bullied as bosses wiil even in the great free land, and the men as the day drew on swore back beneath their bieath. “ jjoru' by hour the relentless work went on. The sun had soon, absorbed the last drop of the morning rain, and the ruins lay burning hot under our feet The air quivered in the heat reflected from the stone and plaster about; the fine lime dust choked, our breathing as we shovelled the refuse into the carts. You could hear the muttered oaths of the men as they swore softly in many tongues at the boss, and cursed him for a brute. But ceaselesly the work went on. We worked as though possessed by a curious numbness that kept us half unconscious of the straining effort, which had become mechanical, until we were brought up by some spasm of strained muscles.” VVork like this is a rare freshener of the appetite for both food and drink. And here is the amateur’s description of his sensations: — “I was hungry, not with hunger that comes from a day’s shooting, but with a ravenous hunger which fits you to fight like a beast for your food, and to eat it raw in brutal haste for gratification. But more than hungry, I was thirsty. Odd water had been in abundant supply at the works, and we drank as often and freely as we choose But water had long since ceased to satisfy. My mouth and throat were burning with the action of the lime dust, and the physical craving for something to quench that, thirst was an overmastering passion. I knew of no drink quite strong enough. I have never tasted gin, but I remembered in one of Froude’s essays a reference to it as much in use among working men, and as being seasoned by a dash of vitrol, and eagerly I longed for that.”