eans what; that
think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and
at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think they
say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for the
same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a
little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact
to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of
the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinction
is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you find such
people; they are clowns.

The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when she
has to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners,
has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old
Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned by two
hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to
drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth from which
it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of
human vegetable.

I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a
practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular
record, which some young people who are going to choose professional
advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making
choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful
and serene countenance. A physician is not--at least, ought not to
be--an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a
warrant for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man
has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It
may be necessary in some