hich, in skilful hands, may be protracted to a length which I shudder
to recall. I have sometimes, when an active participant in these
atrocious transactions, lingered in the hope of saying something natural
to my friend (feeling that he, too, was groping in the mazy labyrinths
of his mind for a like expression), until I have felt that we ought to
have been separated by a policeman. It is astonishing how far the most
wretched joke will go in these emergencies, and how it will, as it were,
convulsively detach the two cohering particles. I have laughed (albeit
hysterically) at some witticism under cover of which I escaped, that
five minutes afterward I could not perceive possessed a grain of humor.
I would advise any person who may fall into this pitiable strait,
that, next to getting in the way of a passing dray and being forcibly
disconnected, a joke is the most efficacious. A foreign phrase often
may be tried with success; I have sometimes known Au revoir pronounced
"O-reveer," to have the effect (as it ought) of severing friends.

But this is a harmless habit compared to a certain reprehensible
practice in which sundry feeble-minded young men indulge. I have been
stopped in the street and enthusiastically accosted by some fashionable
young man, who has engaged me in animated conversation, until (quite
accidentally) a certain young belle would pass, whom my friend, of
course, saluted. As, by a strange coincidence, this occurred several
times in the course of the week, and as my young friend's conversational
powers invariably flagged after the lady had passed, I am forced
to believe that the deceitful young wretch actually used me as a
conventional background to display the graces of his figure to the
passing fair. When I detected the trick, of course I made a point of
keeping my friend, by strategic movements, with his back toward the
young lady, while I bowed to her myself. Since then, I understand that
it is a regular custom of these callow youths to encounter each other,
with simulated cordiality, some paces in front of the young lady they
wish to recognize, so that she cannot possibly cut them. The corner of
California and Montgomery streets is their favorite haunt. They may be
easily detected by their furtive expression of eye, which betrays them
even in the height of their apparent enthusiasm.

Speaking of eyes, you can generally settle the average gentility and
good breeding of the people you meet in the street