at the farther corner of the room, eying me wistfully,--"come
here, you poor doggie, and make up with your master. There, there! Was
his master cross? Well, he knows it. We must forgive and forget, old
boy, mustn't we?" And Rover nearly broke his own back and tore me to
pieces with his tumultuous tail-waggings.

"As for you, puss," I said to Jennie, "I am much obliged to you for your
free suggestion. You must take my cynical moralities for what they are
worth, and put your little traps into as many of my drawers as you
like."

In short, I made it up handsomely all around,--even apologizing to Mrs.
Crowfield, who, by the bye, has summered and wintered me so many years,
and knows all my airs and cuts and crinkles so well, that she took my
irritable unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I had been a baby
cutting a new tooth.

"Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was; don't disturb yourself,"
she said, as I began my apology; "we understand each other. But there is
one thing I have to say; and that is, that your article ought to be
ready."

"Ah, well, then," said I, "like other great writers, I shall make
capital of my own sins, and treat of the second little family fox; and
his name is--"

IRRITABILITY.

Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It
is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose
to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit. In fact, it
comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There
are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we
could not conceive of even an angelic spirit confined in a body thus
disordered as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a
state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim
makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and
biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.

Then, again, there are other people who go through life loving and
beloved, desired in every circle, held up in the church as examples of
the power of religion, who, after all, deserve no credit for these
things. Their spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so
cheerful, all the sensations which come to them are so fresh and
vigorous and pleasant, that they cannot help viewing the world
charitably and seeing everything through a glorified medium. The
ill-temper of others does not provoke them; perplexing business never
sets their