,--
All at once, and nothing first,--
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.

--I think there is one habit,--I said to our company a day or two
afterwards,--worse than that of punning. It is the gradual
substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize
their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole
vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All
things fell into one of two great categories,--_fast_ or _slow_. Man's
chief end was to be a _brick_. When the great calamities of life
overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being _a good
deal cut up_. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up in the
single word, _bore_. These expressions come to be the algebraic
symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to
discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual
bankruptcy;--you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no
difference, for there are no funds in the treasury upon which they are
drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing smoking-clubs are the places
where these conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly. Don't
think I undervalue the proper use and application of a cant word or
phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation, as a mushroom does to a
sauce. But it is no better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and
poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of
men and youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear
flash phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a
three-volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the
pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
climate.

----The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

----I replied with my usual forbearance.--Certainly, to give up the
algebraic symbol, because _a_ or _b_ is often a cover for ideal
nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to express a
certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation, (as it
supposed,) all of which could have been sufficiently explained by
the participle--_bored_. I have seen a country-clergyman, with a
one-story intellect and a one-