If
sometimes he did a little work, he spent great part of the time contracted
to me in the kitchen, where it was understood, quite upon his own agency,
that his wages included board. At other times, he called for money too
late in the evening to work it out that day, and it has happened that a
new second girl, deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertain
light, has shown him into the parlor, where I have found him to his and my
own great amusement, as the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else
seemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much. We all know how
pleasant it is to laugh at people behind their backs; but this veteran
afforded me at a very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one might
laugh at to his face as much as one liked.
Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt that
somehow our national triumph was not complete in him,--that there were yet
more finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till one day I
looked out of the window and saw at a little distance my veteran digging a
cellar for an Irishman.
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