tinct straight to his destination,
he trundled that rattling wheelbarrow for many a year over Portsmouth
cobblestones. He was so unconscious of his environment that sometimes a
small boy would pop into the empty wheelbarrow and secure a ride without
Wibird arriving at any very clear knowledge of the fact. His employment
in life was to deliver groceries and other merchandise to purchasers.
This he did in a dreamy, impersonal kind of way. It was as if a spirit
had somehow go 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 of which was
wanting. It was not 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 heerd 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 rare,
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 before he found out prices had gone up in
Chicago. If that boy brings me another of those tapeworm telegraphs,
I'll throw an axe-handle at him." His pessimism extended up, or down, to
generally recognized canons of orthography. They were all iniquitous. If
k-n-i-f-e spelled knife, then, he contended, k-n-i-f-e-s was the plural.
Diverting tags, written by his own hand in conformity with this theory,
were always attached to articles in his shop window. He is long since
ded, as he himself