oman is helpmate to a man was repugnant
to her. She believed and asserted that a man had to be managed, and she
had several maxims to which she often gave forcible and contemptuous
utterance--

"Let a man go his own road to-day and he will be shaking hands with the
devil to-morrow.

"Give a man his head and he'll lose it.

"Whiskers and sense were never found in the same patch.

"There's more brains in one woman's finger than there is in the
congregated craniums of a battalion of men folk.

"Where there is two men there's one fight. Where there's three there's a
drinking match, two fights and a fine to be paid."

But while advocating peace at any price and a tax on muscles that were
bigger than a fly's knuckle she was herself a warrior of the breed of
Finn and strong enough to scare a pugilist. When she was angry her
family got over the garden wall, her husband first. She did not think
very much of him, and she told him so, but he was sufficient of a man not
to believe her.

For a long time he had been a dissatisfied person, leading a grumpy
existence which was only made bearable by gusts of solitary blasphemy.
When a man curses openly he is healthy enough, but when he takes to
either swearing or drinking in secret then he has travelled almost beyond
redemption point.

So behold our man knocking at the door, still warmed by the fray with his
late employer, but with the first tremors of fear beginning to tatter up
and down his spine.

His wife opened the door herself. She was engaged in cleaning the place,
a duty in which she was by no means remiss, one of the prime points in
her philosophy being that a house was not clean until one's food could be
eaten off the floor. She was a big comely woman, but at the moment she
did not look dainty. A long wisp of red hair came looping down on her
shoulders. A smear of soot toned down the roses of her cheek, her arms
were smothered in soap suds, and the fact that she was wearing a pair of
her husband's boots added nothing to her attractions.

When she saw her husband standing in the doorway at this unaccustomed
hour she was a little taken aback, but, scenting trouble, she at once
opened the attack--

"What in the name of heaven brings you here at this hour of the day, and
the place upset the way it is? Don't walk on the soap, man, haven't you
got eyes in your head?"

"I'm not walking on the soap with my head," he retorted, "if I was I'd
see it, and if it wasn't on t