the mob; he found that
enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides
he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed: he
was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never
for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to
exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
him susceptible. Headache threatened--and to him of all men! But was
there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium? Puzzles are presented
to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they
are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in
rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain,
but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they
break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in
hollowness. Or does this happen to us only after a fall?

He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London
Bridge, of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his
affability, his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs,
entirely the reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and
accustomed to receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a
hint to bring on him the charge of punctilio?

'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
fixing a button of his coat.

That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of
his physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
drum-notes; it deafened reason. And was it a Londo