should
have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's
laughter died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's
first day's work in my employment--the devil take him!

The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his
intelligence; asked us if we knew the school-ma'am. _He_ didn't think
much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to
her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to solve the
problem. "She don't know nothing," he opined. He told us how a friend of
his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his
friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum
and spitting. He would stand awhile looking down; and then he would toss
back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him, had
poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it?
It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned
_his_ dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a
fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever
appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine--the verb,
loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He
could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin,
and be more in everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set
my eyes on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work,
revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own
cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above
all things, he was delighted with himself. You would not have thought
it, from his uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he
loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on
a rail.

His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He could be
got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife
stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would
stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or
ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was