way. It was as if a spirit had somehow got hold of an earthly wheelbarrow and was trundling it quite unconsciously, with no sense of responsibility. One day he appeared at a kitchen door with a two-gallon molasses jug, the top part of which was wanting. It was no longer a jug, but a tureen. When the recipient of the damaged article remonstrated with "Goodness gracious, Wibird! you have broken the jug," his features lighted up, and he seemed immensely relieved. "I thought," he remarked, "I heard somethink crack!"
Wibird Penhallow's heaviest patron was the keeper of a variety store, and the first specimen of a pessimist I ever encountered. He was an excellent specimen. He took exception to everything. He objected to the telegraph, to the railway, to steam in all its applications. Some of his arguments, I recollect, made a deep impression on my mind. "Nowadays," he once observed to me, "if your son or your grandfather drops dead at the other end of creation, you know of it in ten minutes. What’s the use? Unless you are anxious to know he’s dead, you've got just two or three weeks more to be miserable in." He scorned the whole business, and was faithful to his scorn. When he received a telegram, which was rarely, he made a point of keeping it awhile unopened. Through the exercise of this whim he once missed an opportunity of buying certain goods to great advantage. "There!" he exclaimed, "if the telegraph hadn’t been invented, the idiot would have written to me, and I’d have sent a letter by return coach, and got the goods
