"Answer the question," ordered the judge, "or I'll send you up
for vagrancy."

Still the man kept silent. Then I spoke up:

"John, tell the court where you were before you came here and
also where you have been since you arrived in the city."

"I was in Pittsburgh," he said, and he proceeded to tell the
whole story of his life. He was still talking when they chased
him out of court and took up the next case. He was a free man,
and yet he had come within an inch of going to jail. All because
he didn't know what "previous to the eighth and immediately
subsequent thereto" meant.

The man was an expert puddler. A puddler makes iron bars. They
were going to put him behind his own bars because he couldn't
understand the legal jargon. Thanks to the great educational
system of America the working man has improved his mental muscle
as well as his physical.

This taught me a lesson. Jargon can put the worker in jail. Big
words and improper phraseology are prison bars that sometimes
separate the worker from the professional people. "Stone walls do
not a prison make," because the human mind can get beyond them.
But thick-shelled words do make a prison. They are something that
the human mind can not penetrate. A man whose skill is in his
hands can puddle a two hundred-pound ball of iron. A man whose
skill is on his tongue can juggle four-syllable words. But that
iron puddler could not savvy four-syllable words any more than