e so evident that they hardly call for further illustration. The
garrulous man, paradoxical as it may seem to say it, is a kind of
pickpocket without intending to steal anything--nay, rather he is fain
to please you by placing something in your pocket--though too often it
is like the egg of the cuckoo in the nest of another bird.

III. Now, as to _Interruption_, what's to be done? It is a question that
I have often considered. For the evil is great, and the remedy occult. I
look upon a man that interrupts another in conversation as a monster
far less excusable than a cannibal; yet cannibals (though,
comparatively with _interrupters_, valuable members of society) are
rare, and, even where they are _not_ rare, they don't practise as
cannibals every day: it is but on sentimental occasions that the
exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who
interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere;
and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days,
festival or fast, makes no difference to _them_. This enormous nuisance
I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted
in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's politeness of
never interrupting. What, absolutely _never_? Is there _no_ case in
which I should? If a man's nose, or ear, as sometimes happens in high
latitudes, were suddenly and visibly frost-bitten, so as instantly to
require being rubbed with snow, I conceive it lawful to interrupt that
man in the most pathetic sentence, or even to ruin a whole paragraph of
his prose. You can never indeed give him back the rhetoric which you
have undermined; _that_ is true; but neither could he, in the
alternative case, have given back to himself the nose which you have
saved.

I contend also, against a great casuist in this matter, that had you
been a friend of AEschylus, and distinctly observed that absurd old
purblind eagle that mistook (or pretended to mistake) the great poet's
bald head--that head which created the Prometheus and the Agamemnon--for
a white tablet of rock, and had you interrupted the poet in his talk at
the very moment when the bird was dropping a lobster on the sacred
cranium, with the view of unshelling the lobster, but unaware that at
the same time he was unshelling a great poet's brain, you would have
been fully justified. An impertinence it would certainly have been to
interrupt a sentence as undeniable in its Greek