THE SCOUT.

I WONDER if it ever occurred to any one to make a careful study of the ordinary Irishman, the kind who builds fires for his living. The specimen with which I have daily intercourse would furnish a careful student of human nature with a fund of amusement and instruction that would be inexhaustible. I ask you, my reader, to picture to yourself a man whose sole care in life, as far as it appears, is the burden of lighting sundry fires and cleaning various boots. It would seem as if this responsibility was not enough to make him absent-minded, yet one would suppose that a tolerably well-brought-up mule would know that a day in January with the wind blowing at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and the thermometer feeling after the floor, was colder than the spring days of April; but not so my scout. All through the winter he used to put barely coal enough on the fire to keep it from going out, and would leave the door open and me shivering as long as he could. But now mark the change. I wake up in the morning and find my grate heaped to overflowing with red-hot coals. If I go out, and leave the window open to cool it off, I come back and find that my faithful servant has been in and shut it before me allowing the mercury to regain its former position, and from that lofty eminence it smiles blandly upon me as I enter.

Another peculiarity of his is that, if I give him special instructions about anything, he takes great pains to do exactly the opposite of what I have told him. If I say that I am going away to pass Sunday, and do not want a fire lighted, he puts himself to a great deal of pains to keep the fire blazing all day. And if I tell him I shall be back at a certain time, I am sure, upon my arrival, to find a desolate hearth.

His strongest point appears when I try to give him a good sound scolding. He listens for a minute while my indignation is rising and my words are growing louder; but before my wrath boils over, he floods me with such a torrent of rich brogue, which I cannot understand, that I am left completely at his mercy. The faster he talks the lower my spirits sink. Being possessed of the advantage of being able to understand what I say, while my replies to him are made without the remotest idea of what I am answering, he has me at his mercy; and I sink exhausted into my armchair, while he chatters himself victoriously out of the door.