, and I cannot fairly expect you to commit suicide,
however much I may desire it. Moreover, your subjects--for, to be
candid, you are a despot--seem to like you. You minister so craftily
to their self-esteem, you flatter their vanity with an adroitness
so remarkable, that, after a few feeble struggles, they resign
themselves, body and soul, to your thrall. Even then you proceed
warily. Your first labour is to collect, with patient care, all the
little elements of dissatisfaction that are latent in every nature,
and to blend them with the petty disappointments to which even the
best of us are liable. The material thus obtained you temper with
intentions that seem to be good, and eventually you forge out of it a
weapon of marvellous point and sharpness, with which you mercilessly
goad your victims along the path that leads to ridicule and disaster.

Let me take an instance which I am sure you will remember. When
I first met little DABCHICK, I thought I had never seen a happier
mortal. He was clever, good-natured, and sprightly. He sold tea
somewhere in Mincing Lane, and on the proceeds of his sales he managed
to support a wife and two pleasant children in reasonable comfort
at Balham. Mrs. DABCHICK could not be accused by her best friends of
over-refinement, but everybody agreed that she was just the homely,
comfortable, housewifely person who would always make DABCHICK happy,
and be a good and careful mother to his children. Often in the old
days when I came down to Balham and took pot-luck with DABCHICK, while
Mrs. DABCHICK beamed serenity and middle-class satisfaction upon me
from the other end of the table, and the juvenile JOHNNY DABCHICK
recited in a piping treble one of Mr. GEORGE R. SIMS's most moving
pieces for our entertainment, often, I say, have I envied the simple
happiness of that family, and gone back to my bachelor chambers with
an increased sense of dissatisfaction. Why, I thought to myself, had
fate denied to me the peaceful domesticity of the DABCHICKS? I was as
good a man as DABCHICK, probably, if the truth were known, a better
than he. Yet there he was with a good wife, an agreeable family, and
a comfortable income to compensate him for his extravagance with the
letter h, while I had to toil and moil in solitary gloom.

Now, however, all is changed. In an evil moment for himself, DABCHICK
speculated largely and successfully in the Gold Trust of Guatemala. In
a very short time his income was multiplie