as a personal insult.
If he makes a bad stroke he seems to think that the way to retrieve it
is to deliver the next one on the head of the other player. He does
not tarry for the invitation to lay on; and before you know what has
happened you find yourself in a position where you are obliged to cry,
"Hold, enough!" and to be liberally damned without any bargain to that
effect. This is discouraging, and calculated to make one wish that human
intercourse might be put, as far as Macduff is concerned, upon the gold
basis of silence.

On the other hand, what a delight it was to talk with that old worthy,
Chancellor Howard Crosby. He was a fighting man for four or five
generations hack, Dutch on one side, English on the other. But there was
not one little drop of gall in his blood. His opinions were fixed to a
degree; he loved to do battle for them; he never changed them--at least
never in the course of the same discussion. He admired and respected
a gallant adversary, and urged him on, with quips and puns and daring
assaults and unqualified statements, to do his best. Easy victories were
not to his taste. Even if he joined with you in laying out some common
falsehood for burial, you might be sure that before the affair was
concluded there would be every prospect of what an Irishman would call
"an elegant wake." If you stood up against him on one of his favorite
subjects of discussion you must be prepared for hot work. You would have
to take off your coat. But when the combat was over he would be the man
to help you on with it again; and you would walk home together arm in
arm, through the twilight, smoking the pipe of peace. Talk like that
does good. It quickens the beating of the heart, and leaves no scars
upon it.

But this manly spirit, which loves

"To drink delight of battle with its peers,"

is a very different thing from that mean, bad, hostile temper which
loves to inflict wounds and injuries just for the sake of showing power,
and which is never so happy as when it is making some one wince. There
are such people in the world, and sometimes their brilliancy tempts us
to forget their malignancy. But to have much converse with them is as if
we should make playmates of rattlesnakes for their grace of movement and
swiftness of stroke.

I knew a man once (I will not name him even with an initial) who was
malignant to the core. Learned, industrious, accomplished, he kept
all his talents at the service of a