th a giant
from Brobdingnag. You turn it round and round with sad premonition.
The very writing is coldly impersonal without the pinch of a more
human hand. It practices a chill anonymity as if it contains a warrant
for a hanging. At first you hope it may be merely an announcement from
your tailor, inasmuch as commerce patterns its advertisements on these
social forms. I am told that there was once a famous man--a
distinguished novelist--who so disliked formal parties but was so
timid at their rejection that he took refuge in the cellar whenever
one of these forbidding documents arrived, until he could forge a
plausible excuse; for he believed that these colder and more barren
rooms quickened his invention. The story goes that once when he was in
an unusually timid state he lacked the courage to break the seal and
so spent an uneasy morning upon the tubs, to the inconvenience of the
laundress who thought that he fretted upon the plot. At last, on
tearing off the envelope, he found to his relief that it was only a
notice for a display of haberdashery at a fashionable shop. In his
gratitude at his escape he at once sought his desk and conferred a
blushing heiress on his hero.

But perhaps there are persons of an opposite mind who welcome an
invitation. Even the preliminary rummage delights them when their
clothes are sent for pressing and their choice wavers among their
plumage. For such persons the superscription on the envelope now seems
written in the spacious hand of hospitality.

But of informal dinners and the meeting of friends we can all approve
without reserve. I recall, once upon a time, four old gentlemen who
met every week for whist. Three of them were of marked eccentricity.
One of them, when the game was at its pitch, reached down to the rungs
of his chair and hitched it first to one side and then to the other,
mussing up the rugs. The second had the infirmity of nodding his head
continuously. Even if he played a trivial three spot, he sat on the
decision and wagged his beard up and down like a judge. The third
sucked his teeth and thereby made hissing noises. Later in the evening
there would be served buttermilk or cider, and the sober party would
adjourn at the gate. But there were two young rascals who practiced
these eccentricities and after they had gone to bed, for the
exquisite humor of it, they nodded their heads, too, and sucked their
teeth with loud hissing noises.

No one entertains more pleas