He was of
English blood, and had never seemed to imbibe into his veins the
restless haste and hunger to rise which is the source of much that is
good and most that is evil in American life. In the dreams of his early
married days he created a future for his children, in the image of his
own decent existence. The boys should succeed him in his shop, and the
daughters should go out to service in respectable families. This
thought sweetened his toil. When he got on well enough to build a shop
for himself, he burdened himself with debt, building it firmly and
well, so as to last out his boys' time as well as his own. When he was
employed on the joiner-work of some of those large houses in Algonquin
Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters
employed as house-maids in them. He studied the faces and the words of
the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they
would make kind and considerate employers. He put many an extra stroke
of fine work upon the servants' rooms he finished, thinking: "Who knows
but my Mattie may live here sometime?"
But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so
easily managed.
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