--Woman's rights!--said I,--there you have it! Why don't those talking
ladies take a spider as their emblem? Let them form arachnoid
associations, spinsters and spiders would be a good motto.
--The Master smiled. I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my
pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon it in
cold blood. But conversation at the best is only a thin sprinkling of
occasional felicities set in platitudes and commonplaces. I never heard
people talk like the characters in the "School for Scandal,"--I should
very much like to.---I say the Master smiled. But the Scarabee did not
relax a muscle of his countenance.
--There are persons whom the very mildest of faecetiae sets off into such
convulsions of laughter, that one is afraid lest they should injure
themselves. Even when a jest misses fire completely, so that it is no
jest at all, but only a jocular intention, they laugh just as heartily.
Leave out the point of your story, get the word wrong on the duplicity of
which the pun that was to excite hilarity depended, and they still honor
your abortive attempt with the most lusty and vociferous merriment.
There is a very opposite class of persons whom anything in the nature of
a joke perplexes, troubles, and even sometimes irritates, seeming to make
them think they are trifled with, if not insulted.
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