ht and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Man
kept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. Charlie
Wax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always so
well-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone with
him under compulsion to keep up a conversation.

Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of the
printing-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and kept
mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our
arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with the
mind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if the
reader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_
accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulate
thinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before his
progeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and even
then they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice.

Language, in short, must be invented before anybody can be bored with
it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume
Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal
necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the
plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret
Nature.' An internal necessity, yes--except in the case of the Bore
Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's
anything but secret sense of his ability to interpret himself.

Speech grew slowly; and mankind, now a speaking animal, had
centuries--nay, epochs--in which to become habituated to the
longwindedness that Job accepted as a matter of course in Eliphaz,
Bildad, and Zophar. So that even to-day many, like Job, Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar, bore and are bored without really knowing it.

In the last analysis a bore bores because he keeps us from something
more interesting than himself. He becomes a menace to happiness in
proportion as the span of life is shortened by an increasing number of
things to do and places to go between crib and coffin. Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, full of an unusual personal experience that the
leisurely reader finds most horridly entertaining, bored the Wedding
Guest because at that moment the Wedding Guest wanted to get to the
wedding, and was probably restrained from violence only by the
subconscious thought that it is not good form to ap