"I'd be well enough if it wasn't for the sense of responsibility that sometimes oppresses me," said he. "It's a terrible weight on a single man's shoulders that a daily paper is, so it is."
"No doubt," said I. "Do you feel it on your shoulders now?"
"Don't I just?" said he. "I've been buying some emulsion inside to see if that will give me any ease."
He then told me a painfully circumstantial story of how, when walking home early in the morning, he was set upon by some desperate miscreant, who had struck him twice upon his left eye, which might account, he said, for any slight discolouration I might notice in the region of that particular organ if I looked closely at it.
I inquired. "It looks as if it had been powdered."
"Blast it!" said he, taking off his hat, and disclosing several hillocks of red heather with a patch of white sticking-plaster on their summits--like the illustration of the snow line on a geological model of the earth's surface. "Blast it! It must have been the ceiling. It's a dog's life an editor's is, anyhow."
Of course, the foregoing narrative is only illustrative of the exuberance of the Irish nature under depressing circumstances; but I have also come in contact with sub-editors who were constitutionally quarrelsome. They were nearly as disagreeable to work with as those who were perpetually standing on their dignity--men who were never without a complaint of being insulted. I bore with one of this latter class longer than any one else would have done. He was the most incompetent man whom I ever met, so that one night when he growled out that he had never been so badly treated by his inferiors as he was just at that instant, I had no compunction in saying,--
"By my inferiors in this office," he replied.
"I'd like to know where your inferiors are," said I. "They're not in this office--so much I can swear. I doubt if they are in any other."
He asked me if I meant to insult him, and I assured him that I invariably made my meaning so plain when I had occasion to say anything, there was no excuse for asking what I meant.
He never talked to me again about being insulted.
Another curious specimen of an extinct animal was subject to remarkable fits of depression and moroseness. He offered to make me a bet one night that he would not be alive on that day week. I took him up promptly, and offered to stake a five-pound note on the issue, provided that he did the same. He said he hadn't a five-pound note in the world, though he had been toiling like a galley slave for twenty years. I pitied the poor fellow, though it was not until I saw his wife--a mass of black beads and pomatum--that I recognised his right to the consolation of pessimism. I believe that he was only deterred from suicide by an irresistible belief in a future state. He had heard a well-meant but injudicious sermon in which the statement was made that husband and wife, though parted by death, would one day be reunited. Believing this he lived on. What was the use of doing anything else?