I tried to sell a load of slabs to Charles Augustus Clarence Dabbs. He owns a farm some nine miles long, and twice as wide—unless I’m wrong; I am not sure about its size, but it is big, or some one lies.
“I cannot blow myself for slabs,” said Charles Augustus Clarence Dabbs; “with forty kinds of grief I’m filled, I’m not in shape this year to build. When one is loaded to the ears with cares and woes, and doubts and fears, he’s in no mood to talk of planks, or building stunts, you bet your shanks.
“The government,” said Mr. Dabbs, “is on the farmers keeping tabs; it looks to us to raise the wheat, that half the blooming world shall eat. It looks to us for corn and hay, and succotash and beans and whey. We farmers want to raise the stuff; we surely have desire enough; we have the land, we have the mules, we have the seed, we have the tools, but where in thunder shall we get the laborers, to toil and sweat? We cannot keep men on the farm; the life appears to have no charm. I need a half a dozen hands to cultivate my fertile lands; I’d give them work the whole year round, if men of muscle could be found.”
“It is a problem old and hoar,” I said, and sat down on the floor. “It is a problem that will grow more frightful as the sad years go, unless you farmers realize that laborers are human guys. They want to live a normal life, each with his fireside and his wife, and not be packed in garrets bare up forty miles of winding stair.
“If I were farming, Mr. Dabbs, instead of selling rosewood slabs, I’d build some nifty little shacks, to house my toiling Jills and Jacks. I’d say to men I hired, ‘You see, you do not have to live with me; you have your house in which to dwell, a garden and a cow and well, a rooster and a Dorking hen, which things appeal to honest men.’
“When you take up that sort of thing, your men will stay with you, by jing.”
Then Mr. Dabbs sat down by me. “There may be truth in that,” said he. “I’m blamed if I don’t try it out, so let us see some plans, old scout.”
We figured there for half a day, and when the patron drove away, he hauled a load of joists and jambs, and seemed as chipper as nine clams.