ate opinion every mother's son of them will lie at any
time rather than confess ignorance.

I have a kind of dread, rather than hatred, of persons with a large
excess of vitality; great feeders, great laughers, great story-tellers,
who come sweeping over their company with a huge tidal wave of animal
spirits and boisterous merriment. I have pretty good spirits myself, and
enjoy a little mild pleasantry, but I am oppressed and extinguished by
these great lusty, noisy creatures, and feel as if I were a mute at a
funeral when they get into full blast.

I can not get along much better with those drooping, languid people,
whose vitality falls short as much as that of the others is in excess. I
have not life enough for two; I wish I had. It is not very enlivening to
meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, "You are the
hair that breaks the camel's back of my endurance, you are the last drop
that makes my cup of woe run over;" persons whose heads drop on one side
like those of toothless infants, whose voices recall the tones in which
our old snuffling choir used to wail out the verses of

"Life is the time to serve the Lord."

There is another style which does not captivate me. I recognize an
attempt at the _grand manner_ now and then, in persons who are well
enough in their way, but of no particular importance, socially or
otherwise. Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to be
at the bottom of it, and it survives all the advantages that used to set
it off. I like family pride as well as my neighbors, and respect the
high-born fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not worked in their
shirt-sleeves for the last two generations full as much as I ought to.
But _grand-pere oblige_; a person with a known grandfather is too
distinguished to find it necessary to put on airs. The few Royal Princes
I have happened to know were very easy people to get along with, and had
not half the social knee-action I have often seen in the collapsed
dowagers who lifted their eyebrows at me in my earlier years.

My heart does not warm as it should do towards the persons, not
intimates, who are always _too_ glad to see me when we meet by accident,
and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to unbosom
themselves of to me.

There is one blameless person whom I can not love and have no excuse for
hating. It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise inoffensive to me,
whom I find I have involuntarily joi