ry
good meaning, if everybody will subscribe to it. But sundry of these
well-behaved people will mistake your civility and complacence for a
recognition of special affinity, and proceed at once to frame an
alliance offensive and defensive while the sun and the moon shall
endure. O, the barnacles that cling to your keel in such waters! The
inevitable result is, that they win your intense rancor. You would feel
a genial kindliness toward them, if they would be satisfied with that;
but they lay out to be your specialty. They infer your innocent little
inch to be the standard-bearer of twenty ells, and goad you to frenzy. I
mean you, you desperate little horror, who nearly dethroned my reason
six years ago! I always meant to have my revenge, and here I impale you
before the public. For three months, you fastened yourself upon me, and
I could not shake you off. What availed it me, that you were an honest
and excellent man? Did I not, twenty times a day, wish you had been a
villain, who had insulted me, and I a Kentucky giant, that I might have
the unspeakable satisfaction of knocking you down? But you added to your
crimes virtue. Villainy had no part or lot in you. You were a member of
a church, in good and regular standing; you had graduated with all the
honors worth mentioning; you had not a sin, a vice, or a fault that I
knew of; and you were so thoroughly good and repulsive that you were a
great grief to me. Do you think, you dear, disinterested wretch, that I
have forgotten how you were continually putting yourself to horrible
inconveniences on my account? Do you think I am not now filled with
remorse for the aversion that rooted itself ineradicably in my soul, and
which now gloats over you, as you stand in the pillory where my own
hands have fastened you? But can nature be crushed forever? Did I not
ruin my nerves, and seriously injure my temper, by the overpowering
pressure I laid upon them to keep them quiet when you were by? Could I
not, by the sense of coming ill through all my quivering frame, presage
your advent as exactly as the barometer heralds the approaching storm?
Those three months of agony are little atoned for by this late
vengeance; but go in peace!

Mysterious are the ways of friendship. It is not a matter of reason or
of choice, but of magnetisms. You can not always give the premises nor
the argument, but the conclusion is a palpable and stubborn fact. Abana
and Pharpar may be broad, and deep, and blu