g with the folks without names,
as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the quintaan. You run
full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand
on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it;
and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back
of your neck. "Ananias," for instance, pitches into your lecture, we
will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your
servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names,
they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling
potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you
think is going to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know
enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells
lies. Now you think you 've got him! Not so fast. "Ananias" keeps still
and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If
you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what
good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--keep your
temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and looked
at it as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious
punch with it.

Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after
seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.

--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects,
about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and
to live with.

--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among the
men, in every denomination.

--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:

1. The comfortably rich.
2. The decently comfortable.
3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.

--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
clinch.

--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were
two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.

--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.

--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the