Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt this
emotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from a
mind too analytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it.
The nice consideration for the happiness of others which marks a
gentleman may even make him particularly susceptible to this haunting
apprehension. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit still
and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.' But pumping is
different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in
my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat,
on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly
wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled
something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a
glassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that
has made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I would
depart like a sky-rocket!

Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when the
correspondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantages
for deficient adults, that one never sees an advertisement--

STOP BEING A BORE!

If you _bore people_ you can't be loved.
_Don't you want to be loved?_ Don't YOU?

Then sign and mail this coupon _at once_.
Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his
famous mail course, _How not to be a Bore_.

The explanation, I fancy, must be that people who sign and mail coupons
_at once_ do not know when they are bored; that the word 'boredom,' so
hopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is nevertheless
but caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprising
correspondence school.

A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields some
striking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to have
regarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's
_Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothing
about boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently never
been studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and Bores
Negative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself.

The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. Unlike
Carlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, and
so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sits
tig