y, based upon a careful comparison of
similarities, is that the good old man is in reality the stage hero
grown old. There is something about the good old man's chuckle-headed
simplicity, about his helpless imbecility, and his irritating damtom
foolishness that is strangely suggestive of the hero.

He is just the sort of old man that we should imagine the hero would
develop into.

We may, of course, be wrong; but that is our idea.

THE IRISHMAN.

He says "Shure" and "Bedad" and in moments of exultation "Beghorra."
That is all the Irish he knows.

He is very poor, but scrupulously honest. His great ambition is to pay
his rent, and he is devoted to his landlord.

He is always cheerful and always good. We never knew a bad Irishman on
the stage. Sometimes a stage Irishman seems to be a bad man--such as the
"agent" or the "informer"--but in these cases it invariably turns out in
the end that this man was all along a Scotchman, and thus what had been
a mystery becomes clear and explicable.

The stage Irishman is always doing the most wonderful things imaginable.
We do not see him do those wonderful things. He does them when nobody is
by and tells us all about them afterward: that is how we know of them.

We remember on one occasion, when we were young and somewhat
inexperienced, planking our money down and going into a theater solely
and purposely to see the stage Irishman do the things he was depicted as
doing on the posters outside.

They were really marvelous, the things he did on that poster.

In the right-hand upper corner he appeared running across country on all
fours, with a red herring sticking out from his coat-tails, while far
behind came hounds and horsemen hunting him. But their chance of ever
catching him up was clearly hopeless.

To the left he was represented as running away over one of the wildest
and most rugged bits of landscape we have ever seen with a very big man
on his back. Six policemen stood scattered about a mile behind him.
They had evidently been running after him, but had at last given up the
pursuit as useless.

In the center of the poster he was having a friendly fight with
seventeen ladies and gentlemen. Judging from the costumes, the affair
appeared to be a wedding. A few of the guests had already been killed
and lay dead about the floor. The survivors, however, were enjoying
themselves immensely, and of all that gay group he was the gayest.

At the moment chosen by the