If your mind was in a glass
case instead of in a head it would be different; and no one can really
rule and regulate you but yourself, and that's well worth doing."

"Different people," said he shortly, "are made differently."

"Maybe," said I, "your wife would be a good wife to some other husband,
and your brother might be decent enough if he had a different brother."

He wrinkled up his eyes and looked at me very steadily--

"I'll be saying good-bye to you, young man," said he, and he raised his
hammer again and began to beat solemnly on the stones.

I stood by him for a few minutes, but as he neither spoke nor looked at
me again I turned to my own path intending to strike Dublin by the Paps
of Dana and the long slopes beyond them.

II

One day he chucked his job, put up his tools, told the boss he could do
this and that, called hurroo to the boys, and sauntered out of the place
with a great deal of dignity and one week's wages in cash.

There were many reasons why he should not have quitted his work, not the
lightest of them being that the food of a wife and family depended on his
sticking to it, but a person who has a temper cannot be expected to have
everything else.

Nothing makes a man feel better than telling his employer that he and his
job can go bark at one another. It is the dream of a great many people,
and were it not for the glamour of that idea most folk would commit
suicide through sheer disgust. Getting the "sack" is an experience which
wearies after the first time. Giving the sack is a felicity granted only
to a few people. To go home to one's wife with the information that you
have been discharged is an adventure which one does not wish to repeat,
but to go home and hand her thirty shillings with the statement that you
have discharged yourself is not one of the pleasantest ways of passing
time.

His wife's habits were as uncertain as her temper, but not as bad. She
had a hot tongue, a red head, a quick fist and a big family--ingredients
to compose a peppery dish. They had been only a short time married when
she gave her husband to understand that there was to be only one head of
that household, and that would not be he. He fought fiercely for a
position on the executive but he did not get it. His voice in the
household economy, which had commenced with the lordly "Let this be
done," concluded in the timidly blustering "All right, have it your own
way."

Furthermore, the theory that a w