He woke slowly, finished
the rest of his beer--very flat and stale by this time--and taking down
his concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company
of seven volumes of "Allen's Practical Dentist," played upon it some
half-dozen very mournful airs.
McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of
relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion.
These were his only pleasures--to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play
upon his concertina.
The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the
time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten
years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the
heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his
father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady,
hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman,
cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and
energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise
in life and enter a profession.
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