are you here? Gentlemen and
ladies! I was the abbe's first penitent, and I made him a confession,
which I promise you astonished him."

To be sure how queerly things are found out! Here is an instance. Only
the other day I was writing in these Roundabout Papers about a certain
man, whom I facetiously called Baggs, and who had abused me to my
friends, who of course told me. Shortly after that paper was published
another friend--Sacks let us call him--scowls fiercely at me as I
am sitting in perfect good-humor at the club, and passes on without
speaking. A cut. A quarrel. Sacks thinks it is about him that I was
writing: whereas, upon my honor and conscience, I never had him once in
my mind, and was pointing my moral from quite another man. But don't
you see, by this wrath of the guilty-conscienced Sacks, that he had been
abusing me too? He has owned himself guilty, never having been accused.
He has winced when nobody thought of hitting him. I did but put the cap
out, and madly butting and chafing, behold my friend rushes out to put
his head into it! Never mind, Sacks, you are found out; but I bear you
no malice, my man.

And yet to be found out, I know from my own experience, must be painful
and odious, and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I am a
poltroon, let us say. With fierce moustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths,
and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage. I
swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps
knock down a little man or two with it: brag of the images which I break
at the shooting-gallery, and pass amongst my friends for a whiskery
fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon. Ah me! Suppose some brisk
little chap steps up and gives me a caning in St. James's Street, with
all the heads of my friends looking out of all the club windows.
My reputation is gone. I frighten no man more. My nose is pulled by
whipper-snappers, who jump up on a chair to reach it. I am found out.
And in the days of my triumphs, when people were yet afraid of me, and
were taken in by my swagger, I always knew that I was a lily-liver, and
expected that I should be found out some day.

That certainty of being found out must haunt and depress many a bold
braggadocio spirit. Let us say it is a clergyman, who can pump copious
floods of tears out of his own eyes and those of his audience. He thinks
to himself, "I am but a poor swindling, chattering rogue. My bills are
un