“I can tell you; but there’s them that would ship me out of town if I talked too much, so I’ll have to be careful.  John Wesley, you’ve got a grand name, and the church John Wesley started has a good name, though it’s not my church.  I’m a Scot, you know.  But I know your preacher, and he and I are of the same mind about this, I know.  Well, then, if your Methodist Church could find a method with labor, it would get hold of the same sort of common people as the ones who heard Jesus gladly.  These working-men are not in the way of being saints, ye ken, but they think that somewhere there is a rotten spot in the world of factories and shops and mills.  They think they learn from experience, who by the way, is the dominie of a high-priced school, that they get most of the losses and few of the profits of industry.  They get a living wage when times are good.  When times are bad they lose the one thing they’ve got to sell, and that’s their day’s work; when a loafing day is gone there’s nothing to show for it, and no way to make it up.  Maybe that’s as it should be, but the worker can’t see it, especially if the boss can still buy gasoline and tires when the plant is idle.  Oh, yes, laddie, I know the working man is headstrong.  I’ll tell you privately, I think he’s a fool, because so often he gets into a blind rage and wants to smash the very tools that earn his bite and sup.  He may have reason to hate some employer, but why hate the job?  It’s a good job, if he makes good chairs.  He goes on strike, many’s the time, without caring that it hurts him and his worse than it hurts the boss.  And often the boss thinks he wants nothing bigger than a few more things.  Maybe he is wild for a phonograph and a Ford and golden oak rockers of his own in the parlor, and photographs enlarged in crayon hanging on the walls—­and a steady job.  But, listen to me, John Wesley, Jr., and you’ll be a credit to your namesake:  these wild, unreasonable workers, with all their foolishness and sometimes wickedness, are whiles dreaming of a different world, a better world for everybody.  ’Twould be no harm if some bosses dreamed more about that too, me boy.  Your preacher—­he’s a fine man too, is Mr. Drury—­he understands that, and he wants to use it for something to build on.  That’s why I tell folks he’s a Methodist preacher with a real method in his ministry.  Now I’ll quit me fashin’ and get back to the job.  I doubt you’ll be busy yourself this afternoon.”

He gripped J.W.’s hand, so that the knuckles were unable to forget him all day, but what he had said gripped harder than his handshake.  If the furniture factory was a mixed blessing, what of the cannery?

Somewhat to his own surprise, J.W. was getting interested in his town, but if at first he was inclined to wonder how he happened to develop all this new concern, he soon ceased to think of it.  So slight a matter could not stay in the front of his thinking when he really began to know something of the Delafield to which he had never paid much attention.