"
He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a sturdy-
looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand and a bag
in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to which the
old man was bound.
In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet talk--
the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and living in the
Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began boasting. The son,
he said, had gone to that town and had prospered there, owning a hotel
which his wife managed while he worked as a builder.
"Ed," he said, "keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent for
me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will get the
work out of them."
From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling
bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to disguise
a slight turn of vanity in his success.
"I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are all
doing well," he said.
He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical
engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his
children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had
married mechanics.
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