I recall an Italian, who had decorated
the doorposts of his tenement with a beautiful pattern he had
previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan church,
who was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying
property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he had been
put out of his house, as that his work had been so disregarded;
and he said that when people traveled in Italy they liked to look
at wood carvings but that in America "they only made money out of
you."
Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is
followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little
girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic
drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and
later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor
wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a
new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold
ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It
exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that
although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America
he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a
large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of his
"restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on,"
if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to
stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed
without disaster, but that "nothing else would do it.
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