I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul.
There is one who lives next door to me to whom I have
not spoken in five years. Yet when I saw him one day last
spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of old trousers
with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the
other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that
stock-brokers were mere sordid calculating machines. Now
that I have seen whole firms of them busy at the hoe,
wearing old trousers that reached to their armpits and
were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I
know that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts
beating behind those trousers.
Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come
from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had
them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of
ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of
pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him,
just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk
of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing
power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is
estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were
mobilized in Montreal in one week.
But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or
deliberate preparedness.
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