Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/376

348 the break-up of the ice. The roadstead and the docks were swallowing up more ships than ever and a mighty recrudescence was succeeding the long lull in traffic.

The workingmen were laboring without suffering, happy to spend their strength, considering the drudgery, often so painful, as an exercise giving elasticity to their long relaxed muscles.

Even the emigrants, stationed at the doors of the consulates, seemed to Paridael less pitiful and more resigned than usual.

Passing the Coin des Paresseux, he noticed that all its habitués were absent.

Their king, a perpetual loafer, who never worked even when the most downright lazy among them allowed themselves to be hired out, had exceptionally recanted his laziness. This humiliated Laurent not a little. He remained the only drone in the busy hive. He was impatient to regenerate himself in work.

To this end he stopped several brigades of dockers and asked for any employment from their baes, but the latter, after carefully looking him over, seemed not at all anxious to saddle himself with as ridiculous a laborer as the fellow before him, wasted with two months of fever, asked him to come back the next day, alleging that the day was already too far gone.

Drawing trucks, there passed with a slow and majestic gait the great horses of the Nations. On their large collars gilded nails set forth the name or the monogram of the corporation to which they belonged. The drivers of these drays employed for reins only a hempen rope drawn through one of the rings of the collar. Whether they stood up on their empty wagons, like antique coachmen, or whether they walked placidly and apparently unconcerned, by the side of their loaded