r, whom I have
quoted before, is one who has whims or crotchets in the brain. Now a
word about these crotchety folks.

I'll tell you what it is, my friend. The older I grow, the more I feel
inclined to let every man and woman, every boy and girl, act out
himself, or herself. "That is a singular fellow," we often hear it
said. "He's as odd as Dick's hat-band. I don't know what to think of
him. He seems to be a good sort of a man. But he _is_ odd. His head is
as full of crotchets as it can hold."

When I hear a person talk in this style, I feel like saying, "Stop a
moment, my dear sir. He's 'a good sort of a man--_but_,' you say. That
shows you are not precisely satisfied with his goodness; and pray,
what is the matter with it? Why don't you like it, sir? What
particular fault have you to find with it? Come, out with it now."

Press a man, who is talking in this way about a crotchety neighbor,
right up to the point, and you will generally find that the reason he
does not like him is because he has a different way of saying and
doing things from his own.

Now I believe that some folks are odd because they cannot help it.
True, there are a great many who are odd, just for the sake of being
odd. They are ambitious to be known as singular people. We will let
them pass. They certainly work hard to earn the name they love to be
known by; and perhaps we ought not to try to rob them of it, or to say
any thing very severe about their taste. We will let them pass.

But there are a multitude of other people who are odd, and whose
oddities cannot be accounted for in the same way. They are odd,
because they were born so. They are odd, because they cannot help
being odd. If they should try, with all their might, to do as most of
their neighbors do, they would make perfect dunces of themselves; for
every body, old or young, makes a dunce of himself, and nothing else,
whenever he undertakes to be what he is not--whenever he undertakes to
be somebody else. He is not very well acquainted with the race he
belongs to, who, as he goes through the world, does not get this truth
hammered into him.

Why, at this very moment, I can think of at least a dozen odd people,
whom I am in the habit of meeting every day, and who, I verily
believe, could no more help their oddities and crotchets than some of
their neighbors could help having warts come out on their hands. The
crotchets are natural and unavoidable in one case--the warts are
natural