Matt by Robert W. Buchanan — Read

It so happened that the young man of the caravan had two considerable faults. The first fault my reader has, no doubt, already guessed -- he was constitutionally lazy. The second fault will appear more clearly in the sequel: he was, also, constitutionally inquisitive. Now, his laziness was of that not uncommon kind which is capable of a great deal of activity, so long as that activity is unconscious, and not realized as being in the nature of _work_; and its possessor, therefore, would frequently, in his idle way, bestir himself a good deal; whereas, if he had been ordered to bestir himself, he would have yawned and resisted. Here his other constitutional defect came in, and set him prying into matters which in no way seriously concerned him. A little time before the period of his present excursion, when he was studying law in Dublin, and rapidly discovered that he loved artistic amateurship much better, he had often been known to work terribly hard at "cases" in which his curiosity was aroused; and I may add in passing that he had shown on these occasions an amount of shrewdness which would have made him an excellent lawyer, if his invincible objection to hard work, _qua_ work, had not invariably interfered.

No sooner was he left to his own meditations, which the faithful Tim (who had fortunately been away on a foraging expedition during the episode described in my last chapter) was not at hand to disturb, than our young gentleman began puzzling his brains over the curious information she had given him. The facts, which he had no reason to question, ranged themselves under four heads: --