d on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of every
peaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my only
published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring
beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The
work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much
tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all
the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of
distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly
counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the
best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my
awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an
inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin
projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking
in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank
opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion
train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I
have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before
them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I
am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are
apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental
quickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has
thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear
that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the
haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of
ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever
observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were
anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding
that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found
remarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not
rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as
give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a
titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical
associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an
advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by
speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude
on the occasion would more s