I know that I didn't mention it the first time around, but the main character, the narrator of this tale worked at the Colt Building in Hartford, where I lived for just over a year, having moved out only last September.
In any event, the book is exceedingly quotable. Here is another paragraph penned by Samuel Clemens that I find particularly noteworthy.
There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be satisfied, too.
Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him -- why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair -- but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.
I'll be thinking about that the next time I'm standing in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, speaking to the clerk, or ordering food at a cheap restaurant. These folks are indeed working harder than I do, though I get paid more. And all because I've had the opportunity of an education.