ss too familiar.
We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible
compound, "_Pro-Rum_"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of
drunkenness, the _dilettanti_ patrons of pot-houses, the cold-blooded
connoisseurs in wife-beating and _delirium tremens_. That we really
appeared all this to many honest, enthusiastic people could not be
doubted.

Certain perplexing questions, which had fifty times been answered and
dismissed, were ever returning to worry the general consciousness of the
company:--Is it not best to scourge one's self along with a popular
enthusiasm, when, by many excellent methods, it would sweep society to a
definite good? Are not the ardors of the imagination better
working-powers than the cold judgments of the reason? Should we ever be
carping at controlling principles, when much of their present
manifestation seems full of active worthiness? Above all, have we not
listened to contemptible fallacies of self-indulgence and indolence, and
then cheated ourselves into believing them the sober testimonies of
conscience?

That some such melancholic refinements were restless in the brains of
many I have no doubt. Probably only Mrs. Widesworth and the
undergraduates were wholly undisturbed by them. Yet, in spite of this
secret uneasiness, there was common to the company a stiff recognition
of its own virtue, which seemed to impart a certain queer rigidity to
the bodily presence of the guests. Dr. Dastick, for the first and only
time in my remembrance, appeared with his trousers bound with straps to
the bottoms of his boots. Colonel Prowley had thrust his neck into a
stock of extraordinary stiffness, which seemed to proceed from some
antique coat-of-mail worn beneath the waistcoat. The collar and cuffs of
Miss Prowley were wonderful in their dimensions, and fairly creaked with
the starch. The clergyman, indeed, wore his dress and manners in relaxed
and even slouchy fashion; but this seemed not due to lightness of
heart, but only to weariness of mind. I knew that something had caused
him to feel acutely the limitations of his office. One might attribute
such feelings to the bass-viol player in an orchestra, who, in whatever
whirl of harmony, is permitted to scrape out only a few gruff notes. But
there was dear Mrs. Widesworth, so deliciously drugged by the anodynes
of Authority that she could shake the chains of custom till they jingled
like sleigh-bells.

"Come, come," said this g