Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt cage just over his head, began to sing.

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.