ever seems to earn any money.
Sometimes he keeps a shop, and in the way he manages business it must be
an expensive thing to keep, for he never charges anybody for anything,
he is so generous. All his customers seem to be people more or less in
trouble, and he can't find it in his heart to ask them to pay for their
goods under such distressing circumstances.

He stuffs their basket full with twice as much as they came to buy,
pushes their money back into their hands, and wipes away a tear.

Why doesn't a comic man come and set up a grocery store in our
neighborhood?

When the shop does not prove sufficiently profitable (as under the
above-explained method sometimes happens to be the case) the comic man's
wife seeks to add to the income by taking in lodgers. This is a bad move
on her part, for it always ends in the lodgers taking her in. The hero
and heroine, who seem to have been waiting for something of the sort,
immediately come and take possession of the whole house.

Of course the comic man could not think of charging for mere board
and lodging the man who knocked him down when they were boys together!
Besides, was not the heroine (now the hero's wife) the sweetest and the
blithest girl in all the village of Deepdale? (They must have been a
gloomy band, the others!) How can any one with a human heart beneath
his bosom suggest that people like that should pay for their rest and
washing? The comic man is shocked at his wife for even thinking of such
a thing, and the end of it is that Mr. and Mrs. Hero live there for the
rest of the play rent free; coals, soap, candles, and hair-oil for the
child being provided for them on the same terms.

The hero raises vague and feeble objections to this arrangement now and
again. He says he will not hear of such a thing, that he will stay no
longer to be a burden upon these honest folk, but will go forth unto the
roadside and there starve. The comic man has awful work with him, but
wins at last and persuades the noble fellow to stop on and give the
place another trial.

When, a morning or so after witnessing one of these beautiful scenes,
our own landlady knocks at our door and creates a disturbance over a
paltry matter of three or four weeks' rent, and says she'll have her
money or out we go that very day, and drifts slowly away down toward the
kitchen, abusing us in a rising voice as she descends, then we think of
these things and grow sad.

It is the example of the peopl