for the old stagers, it
is slow work indeed. A man curls his whiskers at forty with far less
satisfaction than he surveys their growth and development at eighteen;
he tightens his waist, too, at that period, with a very different sense
of enjoyment. His first trip to Jamaica is little more than a 'lark';
his fourth or fifth, with a wife and four brats, is scarcely a party of
pleasure--and all these things react on the Mess. Besides, it is against
human nature itself to like the people who rival us; and who could enjoy
the jokes of a man who stands between him and a majority?

Yet, taking them all in all, the military 'cut up' better than any other
professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of
life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them
_en masse_, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a
malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, to tell you over your
soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever
a wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone.
Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from
habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other
phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession.

The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that
the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and
stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man
and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that
the fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign
every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for
the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed
by an 'honest attorney.'

As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this
charge. It has been my fortune to 'assist' at more than one visitation
dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the
conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during
the entertainment.

Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity
of their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the
classification--fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving,
road-jobbing, rent-extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in
common. They are the slowest of all; and the odds are long against any
one keeping awake after th