His black hair, stiff as a brush, came low on his forehead; his mouth was large and sensual, his teeth brilliant.  But his hands! never to be forgotten!  Scrubbed till flesh might well have parted from the bones! clean, even if black and mutilated with toil; fingers forever darkened; stained ingrained ridges rising around the nails, hard and ink-black as leather.  Maurice was Labour—­its Symbol—­its Epitome.

At the landlady’s remark he had blushed and addressed me frankly: 

“Say, I work to de ‘Lights.’”

(Lights!  Can such a word be expressive of the factory which has daily blackened and scarred and dulled this human instrument?)

“To the ‘Lights,’ and it ain’t no cinch, I can tell you!  I got to keep movin’.  Every minute I’m late I get docked for wages—­it’s a day’s work to the ‘Lights.’  When she calls me at six—­why, I don’t turn over and snooze another!  I just turn right out.  I walk two miles to my shop—­and every man in his place at 6:45!  Don’t you forgit it!”

He cleaned his plate of food.

“I jest keep movin’ all de time.”

He wiped his mouth—­rose unceremoniously, put on his pot-like derby ajaunt, lit a vile cigar, slipped into a miserable old coat, and was gone, the odour of his weed blending its new smell with kitchen fumes.

He is one of the absolutely real creatures I have ever seen.  Of his likeness types of crime are drawn.  Maurice—­blade keen-edged, hidden in its battered sheath, its ugly case—­terrible yet attractive specimen of strength and endurance—­Youth and Manhood in you are bound to labour as on the rack, and in the ordeal you keep (as does the mass of humanity) Silence!

Eat by this man’s side, heap his plate with coarse victuals, feel the touch of his flannel sleeve against your own flannel blouse, see his look of brotherhood as he says: 

“Say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, I guess I kin get yer in to the ’Lights’!”

These are sensations facts alone can give.

* * * * *

After dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the general living-room:  carpet-covered sofa, big table, few chairs—­that’s all.  We talk an hour—­and on what?  We discuss Bernhardt, the divine Sarah.  “Good shows don’t come to Lynn much; it don’t pay them.  You can’t get more than fifty cents a seat.  Now Bernhardt don’t like to act for fifty-cent houses!  But the theatres are crowded if ever there’s a good show.  We get tired of the awful poor shows to the Opera House.”  Maude Adams was a favourite.  Rejane had been seen.  Of course, the vital American interest—­money—­is touched upon, let me say lightly, and passed.  The packer at Rigger’s, intelligent and well-informed and well-read, discoursed in good French about English and French politics and on the pleasure it would be to travel and see the world.

At nine, friendly handshaking.  “Good-night.  You’re tired.  You’ll like it all right to the shops, see if you don’t!  You’ll make money, too.  The forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious.  Why, to my shop when a new hand applies for a job the foreman asks:  ’What does he look like?  Ambitious lookin’?  Well, then—­there’s room.”