[Illustration: "'HE SHOVELS OFF A FOOT-PATH'"]
"Yes," said the Idiot; "and he attends to the windows as well. As a minder of the furnace he is invaluable. My house is as cool as a roof-garden all through the winter, and thanks to his unwillingness to over-exert himself shovelling coal into the furnace, I burn only about half as much as my neighbors, and my house is never overheated. This in itself is an indication of the virtue of Mike's method. One-half of the colds contracted by children nowadays are the result of overheated houses. Mike's method gives me a cool house at very moderate expense, owing to the great saving of coal, the children do not get colds because of overheating, and the expense of having a doctor every other day is averted. Then his snow-shovelling scheme goes back to the first principles of nature. Mike is not overawed by convention, and instead of following the steps of other men who shovel the snow entirely off, he shovels off a footpath to enable me to go to business, and then sits down and oversees the sun while it melts the balance. Sometimes, if the sun does not do the work promptly enough to suit him, he gets up little contests for the children. He divides up certain portions of the walk into equal parts, and starts the small boys on a race to see which one will get the portion assigned to him cleaned off first, the prize being something in the nature of an apple, which the cook orders from the market. I believe my son Thomas won ten apples last winter, although I am told that the Jimpsonberry boy, whose father's man is cross, and insists on doing all the work himself, is the champion snow-shoveller of the street."
"Yes, he is, pa," put in Tommy. "Mike owes him 'leven apples. I only won eight."
"Well, that is a very good record, Thomas," said the Idiot, "and I will see to it that next winter you have a brand-new snow-shovel with which to enter the contest."
"Mike lets us chop the kindling-wood, too," said Tommy, suddenly perceiving a chance to put in a good word for the genial Mike. "I think he's the nicest hired man as ever was."
"He'll stop anything he's doing to talk to me," ventured Mollie, not wishing to be backward in laying wreaths upon the brow of their friend.