ous about Northampton as he would have been about
Nottingham, and that Bradlaugh and Labouchere and boots will serve his
turn quite as well as Broadhurst and lace and Robin Hood. But that is
not so. Beginning on Northampton in the most confident manner, it
suddenly flashes across him that he has mistaken Northampton for
Nottingham. "How foolish of me!" he says. I maintain a severe silence.
He is annoyed. My experience of talkers tells me that nothing annoys
them so much as a blunder of this kind. From the coldly polite way in
which I have taken the talker's remarks, he discovers the value I put
upon them, and after that, if he has a neighbor on the other side, he
leaves me alone.

Enough has been said to show that the Arcadian's golden rule is to
be careful about what he says. This does not mean that he is to say
nothing. As society is at present constituted you are bound to make an
occasional remark. But you need not make it rashly. It has been said
somewhere that it would be well for talkative persons to count twenty,
or to go over the alphabet, before they let fall the observation that
trembles on their lips. The non-talker has no taste for such an
unintellectual exercise. At the same time he must not hesitate too
long, for, of course, it is to his advantage to introduce the subject.
He ought to think out a topic of which his neighbor will not be able
to make very much. To begin on the fall of snow, or the number of
tons of turkeys consumed on Christmas Day, as stated in the _Daily
Telegraph_, is to deserve your fate. If you are at a dinner-party
of men only, take your host aside, and in a few well-considered
sentences find out from him what kind of men you are to sit between
during dinner. Perhaps one of them is an African traveller. A knowledge
of this prevents your playing into his hands, by remarking that the
papers are full of the relief of Emin Pasha. These private inquiries
will also save you from talking about Mr. Chamberlain to a neighbor who
turns out to be the son of a Birmingham elector. Allow that man his
chance, and he will not only give you the Birmingham gossip, but what
individual electors said about Mr. Chamberlain to the banker or the
tailor, and what the grocer did the moment the poll was declared, with
particulars about the antiquity of Birmingham and the fishing to be had
in the neighborhood. What you ought to do is to talk about Emin Pasha
to this man, and to the traveller about Mr. Chamberlain