nd
that he was satisfied, from the general tenor of his conversation, that
he had studied it with the deepest attention, and firmly believed it to
be a work of unusual merit. Upon this hint he proceeded. Hermann would
have died a thousand deaths rather than acknowledge his inability to
understand anything and everything in the universe that had ever been
written about the duello.

Littleton Barry.

DIDDLING

CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE EXACT SCIENCES.

Hey, diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle

SINCE the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a
Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much
admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The other
gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was a great
man in a great way--I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of ways.

Diddling--or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle--is
sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing
diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a
tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining--not
the thing, diddling, in itself--but man, as an animal that diddles. Had
Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the
picked chicken.

Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken, which
was clearly "a biped without feathers," was not, according to his own
definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar query. Man
is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
It will take an entire hen-coop of picked chickens to get over that.

What constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling is, in
fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons.
A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle
is his destiny. "Man was made to mourn," says the poet. But not so:--he
was made to diddle. This is his aim--his object--his end. And for this
reason when a man's diddled we say he's "done."

Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients
are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity,
nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.

Minuteness:--Your diddler is minute. His operations are upon a small
scale. His business is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight.
Should he ever be tempted into magn