That will do, Murphy," said he, and Mr. Murphy, before he got out,
made two severe attempts to walk through a wall.

For half an hour he sat at his desk in a trance, with his eyes fixed
upon an ink-bottle. At last, nodding his head slowly--

"I'll bet you a shilling," said he to the ink-bottle, "that I get the
sack to-night."

And the ink-bottle lost the wager.

THE BLIND MAN

He was one who would have passed by the Sphinx without seeing it. He
did not believe in the necessity for sphinxes, or in their reality, for
that matter--they did not exist for him. Indeed, he was one to whom
the Sphinx would not have been visible. He might have eyed it and
noted a certain bulk of grotesque stone, but nothing more significant.

He was sex-blind, and, so, peculiarly limited by the fact that he could
not appreciate women. If he had been pressed for a theory or
metaphysic of womanhood he would have been unable to formulate any.
Their presence he admitted, perforce: their utility was quite apparent
to him on the surface, but, subterraneously, he doubted both their
existence and their utility. He might have said perplexedly--Why
cannot they do whatever they have to do without being always in the
way? He might have said--Hang it, they are everywhere and what good
are they doing? They bothered him, they destroyed his ease when he was
near them, and they spoke a language which he did not understand and
did not want to understand. But as his limitations did not press on
him neither did they trouble him. He was not sexually deficient, and
he did not dislike women; he simply ignored them, and was only really
at home with men. All the crudities which we enumerate as masculine
delighted him--simple things, for, in the gender of abstract ideas,
vice is feminine, brutality is masculine, the female being older,
vastly older than the male, much more competent in every way, stronger,
even in her physique, than he, and, having little baggage of mental or
ethical preoccupations to delay her progress, she is still the guardian
of evolution, requiring little more from man than to be stroked and
petted for a while.

He could be brutal at times. He liked to get drunk at seasonable
periods. He would cheerfully break a head or a window, and would
bandage the one damage or pay for the other with equal skill and
pleasure. He liked to tramp rugged miles swinging his arms and
whistling as he went, and he could sit for hours by the side of a ditch