The
porters of both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of grave
intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and to calls in a spirit
of generous festivity upon the peyne d'oro girls in the more remote
side-streets of the town. But he, too, was a discreet man.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years
before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect
of the San Tome mine upon the life of that remote province. The outward
appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am
told, with cable cars running along the streets of the Constitution, and
carriage roads far into the country, to Rincon and other villages, where
the foreign merchants and the Ricos generally have their modern villas,
and a vast railway goods yard by the harbour, which has a quay-side, a
long range of warehouses, and quite serious, organized labour troubles
of its own.
Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of the
port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with
a patron saint of their own.
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