A World to Mend; The Journal of a Working Man (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill June 6. I confess that, these first days in my shop, I am lonelier than ever, with a feeling that I have cut myself off from old associations and have not yet established new. I walk the village street, realizing that I am a stranger in my own country; I might as well have been born in ancient Rome. This may be a democratic country, but I and mine have never lived in a democratic world; from boyhood I have been kept from knowledge of men, save a chosen few. All my years of training, all my personal endeavor, have meant a refining, a selection, an attempt to reach more and more fastidious standards, with no corresponding sense of responsibility toward those as yet unaware of them. Now, retribution has come, for thin veils of thought, of feeling, distinctions that I used to think most important, drop between me and my fellow men. They are aware of it, as am I. At my bench, by the window with a newspaper, I listened the greater part of the day to the footsteps of passing people and caught bits of their conversation. There were comments on the high price of eggs and a report of a good catch of fish; and there were remarks about my open doorway and the sign on my shop. "Where does he come from?" asked one gruff voice. "Dunno," was the sufficient answer. "Anybody know his folks?" I could not hear the reply to this, but I did not need to. The same old question that I have heard so often, though in different circles and in different English! It is indeed a lonely venture, voyaging where nobody knows your "folks"! and the hollowed board steps of my shop are to me, even as to him, the prow of Ulysses' wandering ship, headed for uncharted seas. The morning passed and nobody called. In the afternoon one visitor arrived, growling. I looked up from the page on which ...