\\ 
 
 807.142 
 
 AuJrfioR 
 
 ed.a 
 
 TITLE 
 
 807. l 
 
 31-.52 
 
 The miseries of 
 
 The miseries of human 
 life
 
 
 . - 
 
 X.- J 
 
 T H K 
 
 MISERIE S 
 
 HUMAN LIFE: 
 
 AN OLD FRIEND IN A NEW DRESS. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM & CO., 10 PARK PLACE. 
 
 M.DCCC.LIII.
 
 Entered according to Act of Cong.-e in the } tar 185$, 
 
 BT G. P. PDTS*M & Co., 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of X w York.
 
 URU 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 WE must apologize to true lovers of antiquity for certaiu 
 changes which we have thought it expedient to make, iu this 
 time-honored schedule of the minor miseries that fastidious 
 flesh is heir to, in this dislocated world of ours. The great 
 troubles are perennial, as they are universal. The alternation 
 of smiles and tears in human life, is as constant and as decided 
 as the general division of the earth's surface into land and 
 water ; but the fluctuation of the self-inflicted or factitious 
 miseries occasioned by changes of fashion and growth of 
 luxury, is like that produced by the partial wearing away of 
 rocky shores, or the gradual retrocession of the ocean. A 
 gallant of Elizabeth's time might have complained, if the 
 rushes that strewed the floor of the banqneting-hall, were so 
 much loaded with bones, and other remnants of the feast, 
 that he could not approach his ladye-love, as she sat on the 
 dais, without total sacrifice of grace and dignity ; but would 
 he have thought it necessary, like a beau of the present day, 
 that the soft carpet of winter, with its splendors of flower
 
 6 PREFACE. 
 
 and leaf, should in summer give place to a smooth Indian 
 matting, for the sake of coolness to his tender foot, and his 
 still more susceptible imagination ? If Messieurs Testy and 
 Sensitive had undertaken to record their private personal 
 sufferings, three hundred years ago, the recital would not have 
 elicited a single groan of sympathy from any of us, any more 
 than the lamentations of an Esquimaux over a deficiency of 
 train oil, or the pettish exclamations of a Hottentot belle, 
 against the butcher who has failed to supply her in time with 
 the peculiar substances essential to her idea of an elegant 
 toilette. 
 
 Books like this are, in fact, unconscious chroniclers of the 
 progress of common things ; truer and more available, perhaps, 
 than intentional records. We get information about dress, 
 customs, and the condition of the social arts in Charles II.'s 
 time, from Pepys's diary and such like prattle, that no writer, 
 grave enough to sit down with the intent to give us informa- 
 tion, would have thought worth transmitting. In truth, 
 much of the spirit of a picture lies in the accessories. But 
 we consider that the " Miseries of Human Life," as it stood, 
 had performed its mission for the days of stage-coaches, knee- 
 breeches, and tallow-candles. Those and other horrors, 
 though past, are still too recent to have acquired interest or 
 dignity through the mists of Time. There is a wide differ- 
 ence between being antique and being old-fashioned. " Fish," 
 says the proverb, " is good, but fishy is detestable." We 
 had not the audacity to attempt a wholly new book of this 
 kind, since every production of original genius is unique ;
 
 PREFACE. 7 
 
 and, moreover, even the French, so potent in pettiness, have 
 failed signally, in their Petites Miseres de la Vie Humaine" 
 to reproduce in another form these racy dialogues. Their 
 book, where it strives to be genteel, is frigid ; and when it 
 lapses into the familiar, becomes coarse. Warned, therefore, 
 we adhere to the simple personalities that come home to 
 every man's business and bosom, and to the homely hints 
 which the genial smiles of two generations, have already 
 acknowledged to be apposite to universal human nature its 
 wants and whims its proprieties and its exactions. But as 
 we desire, above all things, a quick, ready, irresistible sym- 
 pathy for our petty (i. e., incident to pets) and pungent (i. e., 
 fruitful in puns) miseries of the happy (Q. Can the neutral 
 word mis-tiap have been originally a compound from misery 
 and happiness, as signifying something between the two ?) 
 we have judged it best, in some cases, to substitute for cer-' 
 tain dilemmas which are neither old enough nor new enough 
 to be piquant, corresponding ones costumed for our own time 
 and meridian, lest the Testys and Sensitives of to-day it is 
 a great family should set us down as fellows of no mark or 
 likelihood : a conclusion which might affect our market and 
 livelihood, in the long run, by making it short. To be 
 suspected of being mental and moral rhinoceroses, might 
 attack our rhino seriously ; so we think it expedient to show 
 our sensitiveness to trifles, that, ex pede, the fastidious may 
 judge of our fitness to trifle with their sensitiveness. A man 
 of nerve is not the right consoler for a nervous man ; nor can 
 a lady who has never had a lover be expected to sympathize
 
 8 PREFACE. 
 
 very sincerely with a rival who has just lost one. So decided 
 and recognized is the demand for sympathy, in those who 
 would aid us, that physicians invariably make faces while they 
 arv amputating or applying hot towels. We trust our delicacy 
 will be made apparent in the straits through which we con- 
 duct the reader, as the pilot proved his knowledge of "every 
 rock in the channel," by running the ship on a sharp point, 
 exclaiming, " There's one of 'em now !" If there is any thing 
 irritating, it is to be told by a fellow whose nerves never felt 
 any rasp finer than an alligator's jaw " Never mind !" 
 "What does he know of the tortures a doubled rose-leaf may 
 bring to one whose sensibilities have been properly cultivated, 
 
 while his power of resistance has grown 
 
 
 " Fine by degrees, and beautifully less ?" 
 
 What does common sense know of uncommon sensitiveness ? 
 Why are people called fastidious, but because they will have 
 what they want, per fas aut nefas, let who will suffer ? The 
 same root will probably be found to have borne the fashion- 
 able term " fast ;" for though the signification may be a little 
 modified, the main point viz., the courage required for 
 walking over other people's impertinent rights and feelings 
 is still the leading idea. What business have " other people" 
 with feelings ? 
 
 A lady's dog bit a beggar-boy. " Poor dear !" exclaimed 
 the sensitive creature i. e., the lady " I hope it will not 
 make him sick 1" i. e., the dog. Exquisitely sympathetic 
 nature !
 
 PREFACE. 9 
 
 It is confidently hoped that our Miseries, as revised, will 
 prove highly acceptable, in particular to persons whose early 
 education has been neglected. If there be any thing that 
 fatally betrays our having ever been in narrow circumstances, 
 it is the power of putting up with difficulties and disagreea- 
 bles any thing short of perfection in any thing. The art of 
 li IK ling fault is first among the accomplishments of him who 
 would substantiate his pretensions to gentility. To be easily 
 pleased, stamps the individual as commonplace. Whether in 
 travelling or at home, the more waiting on we require, the 
 more we are respected ; and if we would have the house 
 fairly at our feet, we must let our dinner cool while we 
 wrangle about a chafing-dish, and swear at the chambermaid 
 if she forget to leave a bible in our bedroom. 
 
 Now, this, our excellent and portable manual, is rammed 
 with hints as to all such matters. Every supposable incident 
 of provocation is here collected, and the degree to which it 
 is proper to be enraged at each, plainly hinted, if not expressly 
 prescribed. Young people may here learn when it is best 
 only to pout, and again under what circumstances scolding 
 would be en regie ; while their elders will find themselves 
 supplied with objurgations, both Latin and English, on 
 occasion of every petty ill, from the encroachment of a friend 
 to the blunder of a servant. 
 
 In performing this service to the great world of those who 
 are striving to appear not small, we have ventured, spite of 
 the caution of Doctor Holmes the Holmes of American 
 Authors in most cases, to write " as funny as we can;" for 
 
 1*
 
 10 PREFACE. 
 
 while we have a tender regard for buttons, we remember also 
 the fate of that Roman author (Q. consul?) who, writing 
 about the grievances of the day, gave them a turn so 
 lugubrious that "many were driven to hang and drown 
 themselves in despair;" upon which the public authorities 
 perhaps the city corporation determined never to reform 
 
 any abuses, but only to stifle all notice of them " forbade 
 
 the said authors to write so any more 1" a prohibition which 
 we should be loth to encounter.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 A groan, the first int-wrench-ment of the siege. Corn-land grown pasture i. e., 
 pat-your endurance. Change not always improvement. A little Latin but 
 there is a translation at the bottom. To ride a-horse-back out and drive a horse 
 back home. A cart-sequence. Not good. Pleasures of solitude. New even-Ing 
 amusements rolling gravel-walks and shearing lawns. Plans for another cam- 
 paign to take Ihejleld in good earnest. Pp. 15-26. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Miseries of games, sports, Ac. Of domestic recreations. New-fashioned geometry. 
 A one-line try-angle. Robin' the dead. Un-atm-iable fortune! Childish 
 troubles no ease but miser-ies. Infancy 1 In fancy I see thy speechless trials I 
 Attacks on dogs are a tax on the feelings of their masters. The affecting history 
 of poor watch. Andrew McCann " absent, but not forgotten." Pleasures of 
 boating. A temperance maxim. The social batcl is a bad game to make ten-strikes 
 in. Whist a deal of trouble and " De'il a bit of pleasure." The arts. " Music 
 hath (c) harms." An unwelcome mental guest is a riddle which is not guessed. 
 Riddles in the old sense, i. e. sieves to strain the faculties. Finish of " Miseries 
 Chap. 2d." (They've finished many a chap besides !) Pp. 2T-40. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Miseries of cities noisome and noisy. Mutual awkwardness, i. e., awkwardness 
 that makes you all mute. "Wakefulness. We only find oblivion when we wish- 
 to be remembered ! Caft-bage, in the tailor sense. A new po(l)ker. A toss-up 
 for choice of partners. " Voices of the night" A feline misery, and a feelin' de- 
 scription of it. When may a story be said to be " going the rounds" ? When the 
 bricks it was built of are being brought down a ladder. The folly of using an in- 
 come for amusing a nincom. Theatres, Ac. Places of public abitsem^nt. " Going 
 to baUet-hacK" not so easy for a common man as a fool. The misery of condo- 
 lence. Is it a bad box to have no box at all f The close of the drama. Pp. 41-61.
 
 12 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Miseries of travelling. "Voyager c'est vivre." Literal people a pest A dig at the 
 dignitaries. Travelling preliminaries. Pilgrim's Progress. Boxing the clothos 
 and closing the box. A memorandum-book "Though lost to sight, to memory 
 dear. A post mortem examination connected with the dead letter office. Rail- 
 roads, beginning with a depot-sition on the nuisance of starting. The whistle a 
 car-tune preliminary to a picture of despair. A stir-up to the placidity of your 
 temper, already saddley tried. Drivers. The only stage-managers who don't get 
 disgusted with the dram(a). The pest the dam-pest of damp sheets. "I love a 
 softer climb" 1 than the upper berth, "Gent's Cabin." Transpositions, a new 
 epidemic. Inoculation for the reader. Light is the smoker's care if he only has a 
 tigar! Cattle damages. The joint-stock having to pay for the dis-jointed. Offi- 
 cial appointments. Miserable sticks elevated to responsible postn. Pp. 58-79. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Social trials. A fair exhibition of the neat cattle of society. Schisms, not witti- 
 cisms. Music racks are well named ; likewise, the strains of which they are the 
 instruments. Noisy pets, that might as well be trum-pets, or pet-ards, at once. 
 It's sometimes pleasant to be found "not at home" never, to be found out. 
 The country tempts you away from home, and the contretemps that follow you. 
 The pains of politeness. The "mould of form" that gathers on social intercourse. 
 An unlucky speech that doesn't admit of a-mealy-oration afterwards. Som- 
 nolence v*. bene-volence. A noar throat is just what a singer should have to 
 reach the high notes with. Building-sites and other exciting sights not heretofore 
 cited. There's one pathy for all diseases, we all employ when we can get it. 
 Sympathy, (and we might add, Aowjc-opathy.) De vinculo matrimonii. A 
 father, lend-er to his offspring. Pp. 80-97. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Library troubles. The handsomer a book is, the more it seems open to in-speck- 
 tion. A book bound to be an annoyance in some way. Magazine literature. A 
 magazine of litter at your disposal. The " cacoethes scribendi" must have been 
 among the " Jexta EomaTiorum." Most authors write an infamous short -hand. 
 Sin-copy personified. The printer is autJior-ized to offer the incredulous con- 
 vincing proofs. Pp. 97-108. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Devil sends cooks, so there's the devil to pay. The cheap eating-honse in two 
 phases. The most thriving bug in New York, except hum-bug. An pnr-n>:ich- 
 ment on our liberties. The upper 10,000 *. the lower 490,000 for lie-ability and 
 reliability. The brick -in-hod-and-in-hat-carrying race's aptness for (ill sorts of 
 fabrication. The de^lenttion of boarding-houses favorable to the rnnjinjitfiii of 
 bachelors. Con-fusion, i. e., a melting together. Boarding-houses, not to be 
 accused of un-chary-table-ness. Efforts at carving proving rather a hindrance than
 
 CONTENTS. 13 
 
 a help, Specimens of gold-baring quartz from tho dough-minions of the baker. 
 A formal dinner. Courses that arc not race-courses. What's a-curd to sour your 
 temper? The cold clialry-tcas of the world! A preparation sooted to the most 
 fastidious taste. Making a mull of it Pp. 104-121. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Miseries domestic. House-cleaning. A lock, no key. A chimney, smoky. Bui! 
 I Mug a nuisance, alone ; find prolific in little Bills besides. The city most opposed 
 
 to the introduction of gas. Spermaceti. Trouble in a gas-tly shape not to be 
 
 made light of. Candle miseries. There's no rest for the wick-ed. The Augean 
 
 stables. (Corruption from liaw-gee-ln' being ox-stables.) An over-T-urn. 
 
 Dressing-room miseries. Bad habits ; the more they are broken, the worse they 
 get A brush with the bristles. Pantaloons. A fit not like a glove, but like a 
 convulsion. A crumb not of comfort. The penalty of Zoa/-ing in bed. Cold 
 weather. Nurses. (Both suggestive of Lap-hind.) After all, the worst thing 
 about a bed is getting up. Pp. 122-144. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Miseries of the body. (Every one nose the blows it is subject to. Ad udfortudate 
 bad who cad dot prodoudce eb or ed. Amateur doctors of a mature age too. 
 The game of draughts. Checkers of perspiration. Better let the ladies alone 
 or you'll surely lose ! Men's best aims are found to be misses, women's to be 
 Mrs. Are man-tillas machines for the cultivation of the race? Harrowing thought! 
 Happiness destroyed by an evil spell. Modern sociability. Oh Pride, thou hell- 
 pest to make mankind wretched. A carriage is like a lottery prize : never drawn 
 when one wants it A dis-tressed damsel. Part-lea of pleasure well named. The 
 pleasure isn't in the meeting. Compassionable ugliness. (The consequences of 
 the small pox are to be pitted.) Pp. 145-159. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Miseries miscellaneous. Caricature portraits. (A day ger-tf -type naturally suggests 
 a libel.) Take Time by his forelock, and he'll retaliate on yours. Tears decline, 
 vanity does not except that it declines to own up. A de-voted candidate. 
 A clerk's not the man to cut & figure. He knows them all too well. A ^-serv- 
 ing youth, with a D-sire to please. The race of beggars. (A hand-i'-cap race.) 
 Urination is a virtue that office-holders are loth to practice. The Tea-room. 
 More-tea-flcation of the flesh agrees with aldermanic corporations. The pavior 
 who cobbles half the street and blocks the whole. We're in the reforming vein. 
 Our efforts are probably in vain too. Ice calls for slippers as naturally as water 
 does for pumps. Sick transit : from the odor of flowery buds to that of Bowery 
 floods. Has our work any mission but dis-mission ? Plans. An outline of the 
 forces a mere shell, having no colonel. AH appears to be d-ishtfl : or, what's 
 equivalent, be-trayed. The greatest misery of all for the reader the end. Pp. 
 160-196.

 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE, 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 " Hinc exaudiri gemitns."* VIBGIL. 
 
 A groan, the first int-wrench-ment of the siege. Corn-land grown pasture 1. e., 
 past-y<nw endurance. A new frog fable. " No sport to you, but death to us." 
 Change not always Improvement. A distinction without a difference. A little 
 Latin but there is a translation at the bottom. The hay-day of prosperity 
 " over the left." Up to snuff and a trifle over. To ride a-horse-back out and 
 drive a horse back home. A cart-sequence. Not good. Pleasures of solitude. 
 New even-ing amusements rolling gravel-walks and shearing lawns. Verbum 
 top. Plans for another campaign to take thejield in good earnest 
 
 Sensitive. This is a hard world, Testy. 
 
 Testy. That is a fact, Sensitive, and besides, a promising 
 opening to our first attack on the army of our enemies. We 
 have to deal with an immense aud obstinate majority of 
 mankind, who persist in their dogma that miseries are to 
 be valued in proportion to their size rather than to their 
 number. 
 
 Sen. Who will be contented, in spite of any and all in- 
 ducements to the contrary. 
 
 * Here a groan was heard.
 
 10 THE MISERIES OF UUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A groan, the first int-wrench-ment of the siege. 
 
 Tes. " All the world's a stage" and I won't be con- 
 tented ! 
 
 Ned Testy. Unless you can be driver, and take the fare. 
 
 Tes. Those are the blockheads we have to deal with, and 
 almost single-handed too ! 
 
 Sen. We are like the one reasonable but unlucky fellow 
 on a jury with eleven obstinate companions. But are we not 
 doing an injury to the race rather than a benefit ? It looks 
 like opening a new Pandora's box, this giving a local habita- 
 tion and a name to these hitherto unrecognised evils. 
 
 Tes. Not a bit of it! We cage them up ; so that all may 
 see what they have to look out for. It's more like crowding 
 the evils back into the box. 
 
 Sen. Except that we unfortunately cannot shut down the 
 lid. 
 
 Tes. And, besides, what do we owe to " the race ]" 
 
 Ned Tes. One owes no consideration to a race where he's 
 won no stake. 
 
 Sen. We shall have earned a stake, Ned the stake of 
 martyrdom if you start with the deliberate intention of com- 
 mitting many such puns. 
 
 Tes. Puns ! Has he been making puns ? Ned, the first 
 time I catch you making a pun, I'll punish you by hiring 
 some other amanuensis, and deducting his wages out of your 
 pocket-money. 
 
 Ned Tes. I shall run no risk of that sort, sir. (Aside to 
 the reader.) Because father never would know if it snowed 
 puns unless some one told him. Although I verily believe he 
 would like to see the whole pun-kin made into one pie, that he 
 might cut them up, yet he makes puns himself sometimes in the 
 most blissful unconsciousness. The fates were kind to him in 
 that one respect at least.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 17 
 
 Corn-land grown pasture i. e., paxt-your endurance. 
 
 Tes. We have to prove to the world tlmt the real retribu- 
 tive evidences of original sin and total depravity are the 
 miseries that go uncounted under the names of bores, nui- 
 sances, fatalities, &c. Now let us open the campaign. Shall 
 I begin? 
 
 Sen. If you please. Open your budget. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Tis but a bud yet, 
 Twill soou burst in bloom." 
 
 Tes, Ay, here they are, biting and stinging, wherever I set 
 my finger ! Well, well ! no matter to business. Let's begin 
 in the country, since we are here, and tell some of the mis- 
 eries of walks, rides, drives, &c., that fools take with the 
 fallacious idea that they are enjoying themselves ! 
 
 1. The sole of the shoe torn down in walking, and obliging you to lift 
 your foot, and limp along, like a pig in a string ; no knife in your pocket, 
 nor house within reach ! 
 
 2. The boot continually taking in gravel ; while, for a time, you try to 
 calm your feelings by believing it to be only hard dirt, and vainly hope 
 that it will presently relieve you by pulverizing. 
 
 3. Suddenly rousing yourself from the ennui of a solitary walk by strik- 
 ing your toe (with a com at the end of it) full and hard against the sharp 
 comer of a fixed flint : pumps. 
 
 Ned Tes. Nay, father, such a kick as that would pay you 
 for the pain by driving out the corn : 
 
 -" segetem ab radicibus imis 
 
 Expulsam erueret"* VIRG. 
 Sen. If you are for corns, listen to me : 
 
 From the corn-field he eradicates its deepest roots.
 
 18 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A new frog fable. " No sport to you, but death to us." 
 
 4. Walking all day, iu very hot weather, in a pail- of shoes far too tight 
 both in length and breadth. Corns on every toe. 
 
 Tes. There you beat me, to be sure ; but it is the only 
 triumph you will have, and so make the most of it. Beat 
 what follows, if you can : 
 
 5. When you have trusted your foot on a frozen rut, the ice proving 
 treacherous, and bedding you in slush. 
 
 6. Walking through a boundless field of fresh-ploughed clay land, and 
 carrying home, at each foot, an undesired sample of the soil, of about ten 
 or twelve pounds weight 
 
 Ned Tes. Ah ! this is, as DRYDEN says 
 
 " A trifling sum of misery 
 Now added to ihefoot of thy account !" 
 
 7- Stooping, tearing, floundering, and bleeding your way through a 
 boggy, briery swamp, with here and there a rushy pool, which takes you by 
 surprise : so that you are more and more entangled and ingulfed as you ad- 
 vance, till you are, after all, necessitated to turn back, and encore all your 
 sufferings ; and so emerge at last, looking like a half-murdered beggar. 
 
 Ned Tes. . 
 
 " Quern circum, limus niger, et deformis arundo, 
 
 -tardaque palus inamabilis unda 
 
 Alligat, et novies Sticks interfusa coercent" VIRO. 
 
 8. Walking obliquely up a steep bill, when the ground is what the vul- 
 gar call greasy. 
 
 Ned Tes. " Labitur et labetur !" Slipping and slopping. 
 
 9. Feeling your foot slidder over the back of a toad, which you took 
 for a stepping-stone, in your dark evening walk. 
 
 10. Making an involuntary acquisition, in the shape of a snowball in 
 winter, or a bit of something sticky in summer, which sticks to your sole 
 as $ie devil might if he got hold of it
 
 THE X [SERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 10 
 
 Change not always improvement A distinction without a difference. 
 
 Sen. I don't mind that, if it relieves me of itself all at 
 once. It is so satisfactory to set your foot down free on the 
 ground again, after the encumbrance is gone. But what a 
 trial is it to a nervous man to go scraping along over the 
 stones, and making his blood run cold, so long that he can 
 scarcely tell when the last bit departs ! His imagination feels 
 as if it were there, when the eye can detect nothing on the 
 boot, painfully upturned for inspection while the owner bal- 
 ances himself on the other leg tottering like a ninepin. 
 
 Tes. After your " something sticky" has seemingly disap- 
 peared 
 
 11. To enter a drawing-room and find out, when too late, that your 
 boot has changed its manner of annoyance from sticking, to tmelliny 
 unpleasantly ! 
 
 12. Or, on the other hand, to step on a bit of fresh orange or melon 
 peel, upon which your foot flies off incontinently in a lateral direction, much 
 to the perturbation of your centre of gravity. 
 
 Ned Tes. And the gravity of the passers-by as well. 
 
 13. To have these misfortunes happen when you are in a great hurry 
 and going along with all your might 
 
 Tes. Bad enough, sir, bad enough ; but this, and all the 
 specimens of bad footing we have yet mentioned, are carpet- 
 ing compared with what follows, as you'll soon confess : 
 
 14. While you are out with a walking party, after heavy rains one 
 shoe suddenly sucked off by the boggy clay ; and then, in making a long 
 and desperate stretch, which fails, with the hope of recovering it, leaving the 
 other in the same predicament ! The second stage of ruin is that of stand- 
 jug or rather tottering in blank despair, Avith both feet planted, ankle- 
 deep, in the quagmire ! The last (I had almost said the dying) scene of 
 the tragedy that of deliberately cramming first one, and then the other
 
 20 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A little Latin bat there is a translation at the bottom. 
 
 clogged, polluted foot into its choked-up shoe, after having scaveiir/ernl 
 your hands and gloves in slaving to drag up each separately out of its 
 deep bed, and in this state proceeding on your walk is too dreadful for 
 representation. 
 
 Sen. "O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!" If, 
 however, it may afford you any consolation, under the recol- 
 lection of a calamity so dreadful, to hear an accurate descrip- 
 tion of it from the master-hand of Tacitus, attend while I 
 ivcitc- it : " Miscetur operantium clamor cuncta pariter 
 adversa locus uligine profunda, idem ad gradum instabilis, 
 procedentibus lubricus ; corpora neque librare inter undas 
 
 poterant Non vox, et mutui hortatus juvabant : nihil 
 
 strenuus ab ignavo, sapiens a prudenti, consilia a casu differre ; 
 cuncta pari violentia involvebantur !" * and now, my friend, 
 let me relieve your mind by a meaner though by no means a 
 tolerable misery. 
 
 15. Pushing through the very narrow path of a very long field of 
 very high grain, immediately after a very heavy rain: nankeens. 
 
 1 6. Ploughing up your newly-rolled gravel walk, by walking over, 
 or rather sinking into it, after a soaking torrent of rain. 
 
 Sen. Nothing can be more pitiable. But having now suffi- 
 ciently defiled ourselves with dust and mire, suppose we pass 
 
 * Confusion and clamour prevail among the labouring victims all 
 things conspiring equally against them the place a deep swamp, treach- 
 erous to the foot, and more and more slippery as they advance ; neither 
 
 could they balance their bodies amidst the boggy marsh The voice 
 
 of mutual encouragement was heard in vain : all distinction lost between 
 the strenuous and the tardy, the wise and the weak, circumspection and 
 casualty; all were indiscriminately involved in the same overpowering 
 calamity !
 
 Till-: MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 21 
 
 The /t<fy-<lay of prosperity "over the left." 
 
 to some of the less ignoble miseries of the country. I will 
 show you the way : 
 
 1 7. While walking with others, in a line, through a narrow path, being 
 perpetually addressed by the lady immediately before you, who, although 
 shr nevfi- turns her head in speaking, and a roaring wind from behind flies 
 :way with every syllable as it is uttered, seems to consider you as pro- 
 vokingly stupid for making her repeat her words twenty times over. 
 
 18. The flaccidity of mind with which you attempt to flog yourself up 
 into an inclination to work in your garden, for the sake of exercise. 
 
 Tea. Nay, there are worse things about a garden than that, 
 I can tell you : 
 
 19. On paying a visit to your garden in the morning for the purpose of 
 regaling your eye and nose with the choice ripe fruit with which it had 
 abounded the day before, finding that the whole produce of every tree and 
 bush has been carefully gathered in the night ! 
 
 20. The delights of hay-time ! as follows : After having cut down 
 every foot of grass upon your grounds, on the most solemn assurances of 
 the barometer that there is nothing to fear; after having dragged the whole 
 neighbourhood for every man, woman, and child, that love or money could 
 procure, and thrust a rake or a pitchfork into the hand of every servant 
 in your family, from the housekeeper down ; after having long overlooked 
 and animated their busy labours, and seen the exuberant produce turned 
 and re-turned under a smiling sun, till every blade is as dry as a bone, and 
 as sweet as a rose ; after having exultingly counted one rising haycock 
 after another, and drawn to the spot every seizable horse and cart, all now 
 standing in readiness to carry home the vegetable treasure, as fast as it 
 can be piled ; at such a golden moment as this, Mr. Testy, to see volume 
 upon volume of black, heavy clouds suddenly rising, and advancing in 
 frowning columns from the south-west; as if the sun had taken half the 
 Zodiac from Leo to Aquarius at a leap : they halt they muster di- 
 rectly overhead ; at the signal of a thunderclap, they pour down their 
 contents with a steady perpendicular discharge, and the assault is continued,
 
 22 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Up to snuff and a trifle over. 
 
 without a moment's pause, till every meadow is completely got under, and 
 the whole scene of action is a swamp. When the enemy has performed 
 his commission by a total defeat of your hopes ; when he has completely 
 swept the field, and scattered your whole party in a panic flight, he sud- 
 denly breaks up his forces, and quits the ground ; leaving you to comfort 
 and amuse yourself, under your loss, by looking at his Colors, in the shape 
 of a most beautiful rainbow, which he displays in his rear. 
 
 21. In your evening walk, being closely followed, for half an hour, by 
 a large bulldog, (without his master,) who keeps up a stifled growl, with his 
 muzzle nuzzling about your calf, as if choosing out the fleshiest bite : no 
 bludgeon. 
 
 22. Losing your way, on foot, at night, in a storm of wind and rain ; 
 and this, immediately after leaving a merry fireside. 
 
 23. While you are laughing, or talking wildly to yourself, in walking, 
 suddenly seeing a person steal close by you, who, you are sure, must have 
 heard it all ; then, in an agony of shame, making a wretched attempt to 
 sing, in a voice as like your talk as possible, in hopes of making your 
 hearer think that you had been only singing all the while. 
 
 Tcs. A forlorn hope, indeed ! if /had been your hearer, 
 I should have said, by way of relieving your embarrassment, 
 " Si loqueris, cantas ; si cantas, cantas male." If you would 
 speak, you sing ; if it's singing you are, you sing vilely. 
 
 24. In attempting to spring carelessly, with the help of one hand, over 
 a five-barred gate, by way of showing your activity to a party of ladies 
 behind you, (whom you affect not to have observed,) blundering upon your 
 nose on the other side. 
 
 25. In walking out to dinner, clean and smart, becoming hot with your 
 exercise, the consciousness of which makes you still hotter, so that on ar- 
 riving, too late to repair yourself, you are obliged to sit down to table with 
 a large party, (each of whom is clean and fresh,) with plastered hair, red 
 varnished face, <tc., <fcc. 
 
 26. Venturing upon a pinch of snuff in the open air, a sudden puff of 
 wind emptying your box into your eyes, the moment you open it
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 23 
 
 To ride a- horse-back out and drive a horse back home. 
 
 27. In returning from a long, hot ride, being overtaken on a common, 
 many milrs I'mm home, by a torrent of rain, which so completely drenches 
 your heated body, that you are obliged, for the preservation of your life, to 
 stop at some lone, mean, public house, undress, and get between the blan- 
 kets, while your clothes are drying: then, after you have lain awake like a 
 fool for a couple of hours, doing nothing, in the busy part of the day, find- 
 ing, when you have re-dressed yourself, the rain increasing, night coming on, 
 and no messenger to be had by whom to send word to your anxious friends, 
 that you must remain where you are all night 
 
 28. On a stubborn horse, coming to a no less stubborn gate, when you 
 have either no hooked stick, or one with so gentle a curve that it lets go 
 its hold as soon as it has taken it ; so that you must at last resolve to dis- 
 mount, though you well know that your horse will afterwards keep you 
 dancing for an hour on one leg, with the other in the stirrup, before he will 
 suffer you to remount him. Or, 
 
 29. To consider it prudent not to remount, but to borrow a wagon 
 and harness, even at the risk of the jeers of those who witnessed your outset 
 
 30. Improving your coachmanship by driving an unbroken horse 
 through a rugged, narrow lane, in which the ruts refuse to fit your wheels, 
 and yet there is no room to quarter. 
 
 81. An overturn the natural consequence of a natural cause. 
 
 Ned Tes. The driver must be a natural, too natural 
 born, as the country people say. 
 
 32. Attending a sale, from a great distance, for the sole purpose of bid- 
 ding for an article, which, on your arrival, you are told has just been 
 knocked down for nothing. 
 
 33. After having sent from the other end of the state to the library for 
 a quantity of well-chosen books, all particularly named, receiving in return, 
 six months afterwards, a cargo of novels, of their own choice, with such 
 titles as " Delicate Sensibility," " Disguises of the Heart,'' " Errors of Tender- 
 ness," <tc., Ac. Then, if you venture, in despair, on a few pages, being edi- 
 fied in the margin by such pencilled commentaries as the following : " I quite 
 agree in this sentiment." " How frequently do we find this to be the case
 
 24 TIIK Misi:i;i'-s OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A cart-sequence. Not good Pleasures of solitude. 
 
 in real life !" " But why did she let him have the letter !" Ac., <tc. ; con- 
 cluded by the reader's general decision upon the merits of the book, 
 stamped in one oracular sentence; for example, "This is a very gnxl 
 novel ;" or, (to the horror and confusion of the author, if he should ever 
 hear of the critique,) " What execrable stuff!" 
 
 Tes. Nay, you well deserve this part of your misery for 
 looking into such trash 
 
 " I, quaeso, et tristes illos depone libellos," 
 Nee lege " quod quajvis nosse puella veUt." 
 
 / will give you a country misery, from which there is not a 
 whit less wear and tear to the nerves, and where you have no 
 possible means of escape : judge for yourself. 
 
 34. Following on horseback a slow cart through an endless, narrow 
 lane, at sunset, when you are already too late, and want all the help of your 
 eyes, as well as of your horse's feet, to carry you safe through the rest of 
 your unknown way. 
 
 Sen. Very distressing, I allow ; but I will show you that 
 the end of a journey may be still worse than the journey 
 itself: 
 
 35. After having arrived at home, completely exhausted by a long jour- 
 ney, and delightfully diffused yourself on the sofa for the rest of the even- 
 ing (as you fondly suppose) being dragged out again, within a quarter 
 of an hour, to take a long walk with a few friends, who are " obliged to 
 go," but who " cannot bear to part with you so soon" the party chiefly 
 consisting of ladies, to whom you are, on every account, ashamed to plead 
 fatigue as an excuse for remaining at home. 
 
 36. In a very solitary situation after having sent some miles off for a 
 remarkably clever carpenter, whom you have particularly entreated to 
 come himself, for the purpose of doing a variety of jobs that require both 
 a nice hand and a contriving head seeing enter, in his stead, a drivelling 
 dormouse, who just knows a hammer from a nail
 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 25 
 
 New even-\ng amusements rolling gravel-walks and shearing lawns. Yerbnm sap. 
 
 37. Passing the worst part of a raiuy winter in a country so inveter- 
 ately miry as to imprison you within your own premises, so that, by way of 
 exercise and to keep yourself alive, you take to rolling the gravel-walks, 
 though already quite smooth ; cutting wood, though you have more logs 
 than enough ; working the dumb-bells, or some such irrational exertions. 
 
 38. Residing at a solitary place, where the return of the butcher, and 
 the delivery of parcels, letters, <fcc., is so irregular and uncertain, that you 
 
 are obliged to get at all the necessaries of life by stratagem. 
 
 
 
 39. While deeply, delightfully, and, as you hope, safely, engaged at home 
 in the morning being suddenly surprised by an inroad from a party of 
 the starched, stupid, cold, idle natives of a neighbouring country town, who 
 lay a formal siege (by sap) to your leisure, which they carry on for at 
 least two hours in almost total silence 
 
 " Nothing there is to come, and nothing past ; 
 But an eternal Now does ever last !" 
 
 40. During the last hour, they alternately tantalize and torment you, 
 by seeming (but only seeming) to go, which they are induced to do at last 
 only by the approach of a fresh detachment of the enemy, whom they 
 descry at your castle gate, and to whose custody they commit you, while 
 they pursue their own scouring excursions upon the other peaceful inhabit- 
 ants of the district. 
 
 Tes. Well, Sensitive, I must confess your last " groan" is 
 louder than any that has yet burst from either of us. 
 
 Sen. Liberally said, sir : it is bad enough, to be sure, 
 though your quagmire scene runs it very close : a sufficient 
 number, indeed, has been produced on both sides to silence 
 the boldest of our enemies ; and yet this, as you say, is 
 " rural felicity !" But let us not triumph before a victory ; 
 they will tell us, I doubt not, that we have contemplated the 
 country but on one side. We have pretty well established 
 our main point, to be sure, viz. : that country walks, rides, 
 &c., &c., are not exactly the roads to earthly happiness 
 
 2
 
 26 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Plans for another campaign to take the field in good earnest 
 
 nothing but the ghost of an idiot could think they are ; but 
 they will, doubtless, exultingly produce a higher class of rural 
 enjoyments, under the names of sports, games, and exercises ; 
 and if they should superadd the domestic amusements of re- 
 tirement, they will consider the country as completely set 
 upon its legs again. 
 
 Tes. Never fear. We will beat them, not only out of the 
 field, but out of the house, too. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) How unfeeling ! Making game of the 
 miseries of our fellow-men. Making miseries of their games 
 amounts to the same thing. 
 
 Sen. Well, then we'll consider it decided. The subject 
 of country sports and amusements, in parliamentary phrase, 
 
 'HAS THE FLOOR.
 
 THE MISEKIK* OF HUMAN LIFE. 27 
 
 Miseries of games, sports, *o. Of domestic recreations. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 , 
 
 MiM-rirs of gnmes, sports, Ac. Of domestic recreations. New-fashioned geometry. 
 A oni-liiie fry-angle. Kobln' the dead. Un-aJ/n-iable fortune! Childish 
 troubles no ease but mlser-ios. Infancy ! In fancy I see thy speechless trials! 
 Attacks on dogs are a tax on the feeling of their masters. The affecting 
 history of poor watch. Andrew McCann "absent, but not forgotten." Pleas- 
 ures of boating. "O. what a row" Ac. A chance for a complicated pun about 
 " in n*i in' the ox that trfadvtk out the corn." A tf m]HTance maxim. The 
 social hmcl, is n bad game to make ten-strikes in. Whist a dfo.1 of trouble, and 
 " lh-'il a bit of pleasure." The arts. "Music hath (c) harms." Drawing. A 
 point rx. diap]Miint. An unwelcome mental guest is a riddle which Is not 
 guessed. Ri<ldlt> in the old sense, i. e., sieves to strain the faculties. Finish 
 of "Miseries Chap. 2d." (They've finished many a chap besides!) 
 
 Tes. Well, sir, we meet still more in heart, I trust, than 
 we parted. As we have taken in a great part both of sum- 
 mer and winter for our amusements, we shall hardly fail to 
 find, on comparing notes, that our cause has realized a great 
 deal of strength, both in and out of doors. 
 
 Sen. Yes, truly, my dear friend ; I, for my part, have 
 been sporting, and dancing, and singing, with tears in my 
 eyes, ev,er since we parted ; and have brought you a pocket- 
 ful of pains, composed entirely of pleasures ! 
 
 Tes. I will match you, depend upon 't but you shall 
 judge for yourself. You may be prepared, indeed, for my 
 first groan, by my limping gait, and this bewitching swathe 
 about my head ; it is but three days since it happened ; and 
 thus it goes : 
 
 1 . In skating slipping in such a manner that your legs start off into 
 the unaccommodating posture of a pair of shears loose on the pivot, from
 
 28 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 New-fasbioned geometry. A one-line try-angle. Robin' the dead. 
 
 which, however, you are soon relieved by tumbling forwards on your 
 nose, or backwards on your skull Also, learning to cut the outside edge 
 on skates that have no edge to cut with : ice very rugged. 
 
 2. To come down on your right knee in such a style as to have to be 
 carried home, with a pleasant subject of contemplation to pass away the 
 time, viz.: the probability of losing your knee-joint through a white 
 swelling I 
 
 Ned Tes. " Hie O, limb, meminisse juvabit." * 
 
 3. Angling for ten or twelve hours, -without a bite, though perpetually 
 
 tantalized with nibbles ; or, 
 when you have hooked a fine, 
 large specimen, seeing him 
 take French leave, at the mo- 
 ment when you are courteous- 
 ly showing him his nearest 
 way to the bank. Or, on the 
 other hand, after falling asleep 
 and letting your tackle repose 
 in the mud for an indefinite 
 time, to wake and haul up 
 with the conviction that you 
 had caught an eel, and receive 
 a practical illustration of the 
 old adage 
 THERE'S MANY A SUP (-PER), Era You had only caught a cold! 
 
 4. On springing, at the right distance, the only covey you have seen, at 
 the end of a long day's fag flash in the pan. 
 
 5. Having got up before daylight, with the most superhuman virtue, to 
 shoot quail, to bring down something, after getting wet with dew up to 
 your middle, and, on picking it up, to find it nothing but a poor red- 
 breast 
 
 * " Hie olim meminisse juvabit" VIRO. 
 Pleasing will this be hereafter to look back on.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 29 
 
 Un-atm-iable fortune 1 Childish troubles no ease but miscr-ics. 
 
 Ned Tes. Although you had seen it quail before your 
 attack. 
 
 6. Then to be confined to your bed, in a miserable country tavern* 
 with the natural consequences of your exposure. 
 
 Ned Tes. Probably a room-attic affliction. One which a 
 dew regard for health would have prevented. 
 
 7. In hunting, while you are leading the field, and just running in upon 
 the fox, with the brush full in your hopes, being suddenly left in the lurch, 
 or, in other words, in the ditch. 
 
 Ned Tes. A slight change from heading the field, to 
 head in the field. 
 
 8. In archery the string of your bow snapping at the moment when 
 you have made sure of your aim. 
 
 Sen. But let us have done with what are vulgarly called 
 " out-door amusements." One groan for every principal field- 
 sport may serve for a sample : sportsmen could produce a 
 thousand more, but all men are not sportsmen ; and we, you 
 know, have to do only with general miseries the common 
 currency of human existence. 
 
 Tes. Common, do you call it? Humph! if this is the 
 common currency, I can only say that, from some twist in 
 our horoscopes, you and I seem to have pocketed all the 
 bogus pieces. By the by, I have not yet done with the open 
 air and its amusements. You must know that I have col- 
 lected from my youngest boy Tom, now at home for the 
 holidays, a few " school miseries," and so put them into my 
 pile. I was pleased at the circumstance, as it served to show 
 that even boyhood, the happiest period of man's life, and 
 school-days, which we are apt to look upon as the happiest
 
 30 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Infancy 1 In fancy I see thy speechless trials 1 
 
 part of that happiest time, are by no means exempt from the 
 general tax upon living and breathing ; nay, even my last lit- 
 tle one told me half an hour ago, as plain as a baby could 
 speak it, of an infantine misery, viz. : 
 
 9. A dry w<-nurse 1 
 
 10. Waking iu a bitter winter morning, with the recollection that you 
 are immediately to get up by candlelight, out of your snug, warm bed, to 
 shiver out to school through the snow, for the purpose of being flogged aa 
 soon as you arrive. 
 
 Tes. Eh, Sensitive? I don't think the blackest beard 
 among us can go beyond that. 
 
 1 1. Seeing the boy who is next above you flogged for a recitation which 
 you know you cannot say even half so well as he did. 
 
 12. At cricket after a long and hard service of watching out bowled 
 out at the first ball. Likewise, cricket on very sloppy ground, so that 
 your hard ball presently becomes muddy, sappy, and rotten ; a jarring 
 bat ; a right-hand bat for a left-handed player ; a hat, vice stumps. 
 
 13. Winding up a top badly grooved, so that the string bunches down 
 over the peg, and, on your attempt to peg it down into the ring, " volat 
 vi fervidus axis ;" i. e., it flies into the eye of a play-fellow. 
 
 14. Your hoop breaking, and then trundling lame, and perpetually trip- 
 ping you up, as you boggle along with it ; the other boys, with good hoops, 
 leaving you miles behind. 
 
 15. Being obliged to take a severe licking from a boy twice as big, 
 but not half so brave as yourself; then flogged for fighting, because you 
 at first aimed one blow, which, however, did not reach the long-armed 
 rascal 
 
 16. At dinner the meat lasting only as low down as to the boy im- 
 mediately above you : you are too stout to eat bread, and so go starved 
 and broken-hearted into school. 
 
 17. Staying in on a whole holiday for another boy's fault, falsely
 
 THE MISKKIKS OF HUMAN LIFE. 31 
 
 Attacks on dogs arc a tux on the feelings of their masters. 
 
 charged upon yourself: very fine day, and the distant noise of all the 
 other boys at play continually in your ears, as you mope in the house. 
 
 Ned Tes. Of course, / cannot remember any childish 
 miseries, it is so long since I could experience any. But I 
 have set down a few young-manly contretemps, which I can 
 give you if you wish. 
 
 Tes. You always were rather anxious to show yourself, 
 you know, Ned. I am afraid you cannot add much, unless 
 you throw in yourself as a concentrated misery. However, 
 we will see what we shall see. 
 
 Ned Tes. I do not hesitate to exclaim with the Latins 
 
 " Pa, see me, too !" * 
 
 Don't be afraid. Some people can do some things as well as 
 others. 
 
 If you have any thing of a fancy for dogs 
 
 18. To be obliged to witness an assault of the dog-killers on a poor, 
 unoffending cur, who has unwittingly strayed out of his boundaries. 
 
 Especially if he be a favourite of your own, and you 
 arrive too late to save him, and only in time to have him die, 
 licking the hand that has so often licked him ! 
 
 Tes. I never happened to be present when that occurred. 
 
 Ned Tes. That never happened to a cur when you were 
 present, you mean. 
 
 Sen. I never will have a dog in my house again as long as 
 I live it is such agony to lose one. We buried one with 
 all the honours, the other day, in the presence of " the family 
 and friends of the family." 
 
 Ned Tes. Dogberrys are not uncommon phenomena. As 
 
 * Parce metu. Spare your fears.
 
 32 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The affecting history of poor watch. Andrew McCann " absent, but not forgotten." 
 
 a particular mark of respect, you may do as a lot of disap- 
 pointed heirs have been known to do on the death of their 
 rich relation and their hopes. 
 
 Sen. How is that ? 
 
 Ned Tes. Set up a railing round his grave. 
 
 Sen. Better than your average. Have you got through 
 your juvenile miseries ? 
 
 Ned Tes. No. Here's another a bit of personal ex- 
 perience : 
 
 19. To remember, just after getting underway for a day's sailing with 
 a large party, that you had forgotten to wind your watch your first watch 
 that you had resolved never to let run down, and that you had wound 
 up every morning for ten mouths ! You try every key in the party with 
 a desperate and fallacious hope, trying to wind the watch while the rest 
 are trying to watch the wind. Instead of a day of pleasure, you feel as 
 if you were waiting for the death of a pet dog. You can't forget it ; but 
 as it goes on tick, tick, tick tick, to the last possible second, you go down 
 to the hold and positively cry. 
 
 Tes. You deserved it. Who ever heard of winding a 
 watch in the morning 1 
 
 Sen. I've thought of that, Testy, and concluded that the 
 morning was the proper time. First ; you get up much more 
 regularly, as to time, than you go to bed. Second ; if, by 
 chance, you forget it in the morning, there is a possibility of 
 rectifying it, whereas no man ever waked up in the night to 
 wind his watch. Third; the habit serves to help us remem- 
 ber to take it out from under the pillow, and there is no 
 reminder necessary to keep us from forgetting to take it off 
 when we undress. 
 
 Ned Tes. Unless it were some one like "Andrew McCann, 
 the absent man." 
 
 Tes. Why, Ned what about him ?
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAJf LIFE. 33 
 
 Pleasures of boating. " 0, what a rote," Ac. 
 
 Ned Tes. He put his watch to bed and tried to wind him- 
 self up. He was accustomed to set his watch forward every 
 night, and, finding that he could only be set backward, and 
 being puzzled to tell which of his hands was the minute hand, 
 combined to recall his sense of their individuality. The 
 dilemma, I think, he must have taken by several horns, and 
 pretty strong ones, too. 
 
 Sen. Ned, I've seen that story in a newspaper ; but, un- 
 less I'm much mistaken, it's grown a full size since then. 
 
 Ned Tes. (confused.) I may have added a little. But full- 
 grown sighs or full size groans, would either be appropriate 
 to your collection of miseries. Your aspersion on my cor- 
 rectness reminds me of another school annoyance. 
 
 20. Telling a story to a circle of boys who shortly interrupt you to 
 tell you the point, having listened patiently so far for the sake of laughing 
 at you for telling over again the same identical story (excepting a few ad- 
 ditions) that you had told them before. 
 
 Tes. Ned's boating story reminds me of a little circum- 
 stance that I think he would quite as lieve I should forget. 
 
 21. To be deceived, bamboozled, humbugged, to "just take a sail 
 round, rather than get up the horses to go two miles." 
 
 You know those were your very words, Ned. We found 
 the boat high and dry on land 
 
 Ned Tes. But then, you know, father, she made up for it' 
 by being half full of water. 
 
 Tes. Very true, you scamp ; and in launching and baling 
 began the destruction of my dinner-party getting up, which 
 had been " regardless of expense." 
 
 22. The wind dies away, and we find ourselves perfectly stationary, 
 and reduced to the necessity of paddling painfully ashore with a piece of 
 
 2*
 
 34 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A chance for a complicated pun about " muslin' the ox that treadeth out the com." 
 
 a seat, having no oars except one, of which the -whole flat part was gone, 
 leaving only the handle 
 
 Ned Tes. Oar-y rotunda. 
 
 23. Which was rather worse than none at all. Then, to arrive at last, 
 and find, sitting at table, a cool, fresh-looking party of well-dressed peo- 
 ple your clothes splashed with bilge-water; your nose showing small 
 particles of white cuticle, relieved against a brick-red ground ; and with 
 hands so blistered, that you can scarcely feed yourself 1 
 
 Ned Tes. It's no bliss to know blisters. 
 
 24. Blundering in the figure all the way through a German cotillion, 
 with a charming paitner, to whom you are a perfect stranger ; and who, 
 consequently, knows nothing of you but your awkwardness. 
 
 Tes. That offence may be forgiven, however not so the 
 following : 
 
 25. Entering into the figure of a dance with so much spirit, as to force 
 your leg and foot through the muslin drapery of your lair partner, and 
 etamp on her delicate pedestal within. 
 
 Sen. There I feel for you, indeed ! 
 
 26. The plagues of that complicated evolution called " right and left," 
 from the awkwardness of some, and the inattention of others. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Palautes error certo de tramite pellit ; 
 Hie sinistrosum, hie dextrorswn obit" HOR. 
 
 27. Being compelled to shift your steps at every instant by the sleepy, 
 Ignorant, or drunken blunders of your musicians. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 u Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis." * 
 
 ; Times change, and we change with them."
 
 V 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 85 
 
 A tfinpcrance maxim. The social bowl is a bad game to make ten-strikes In. 
 
 Sen. I will now give you a ball-room " groan," with which 
 nothing in Holbein's "Dance of Death" can stand a moment's 
 comparison : 
 
 28. When you have imprudently cooled yourself with a glass of ice 
 after dancing very violently, beiug immediately told by a medical friend 
 that you have no chance for your life but by continuing the exercise with 
 all your might ; then, the state of horror in which you suddenly cry out 
 for "Go to the devil and shake yourself," or any other such frolicsome 
 tune, and the heart-sinking apprehensions under which you instantly tear 
 down the dance, and keep rousing all the rest of the couples, who, having 
 fciken no ice, can afford to move with less spirit 
 
 29. To wait, fretting and fuming, for some favourite dance, while the 
 old fogies, forming the majority of the company, dig away at their wretched 
 cotillions, <u-., one set forming as soon as another is done. 
 
 30. Tripping on the light fantastic toe of your partner. 
 
 Ned Tes. Either of those last must be dreadful to a 
 dancer of good caperbilities. 
 
 Sen. So much for dancing. Let us examine a few more 
 domestic recreations. Will billiards give happiness 1 ? 
 
 Tes. I'll tell you : 
 
 81. When your adversary lacks but one of being out, to make a splen- 
 did double-stroke that would win you the game, but that your own ball 
 pockets itself after all. 
 
 Ned Tes. In bowling, at a watering-place, before a party 
 of ladies, in a tremendous effort to show off 
 
 32. To make a hcelve-strike, i. e., knock down the ten pins, yourself, 
 and the boy 1 
 
 Sen. Ah, ha ! There is a thing or two that trench on per- 
 sonal vanity ; and who is there to whom they are without 
 significance ? Who is there, in all humanity, from the little
 
 36 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Whist a deal of trouble, and "2>e'il a bit of pleasure." 
 
 plague that just knows it is " Me ! Me !" he sees in the glass, 
 up to the old fellow who thinks it is a secret that he wears a 
 wig, and tries to be sure no one is looking whenever he takes 
 off his hat ! 
 
 33. Missing your cue at every stroke ("totum nee pertulit ictum") 
 and tliis when you are particularly ambitious of showing your play. 
 
 Ned Tes. Miss Q. is the least agreeable acquaintance 
 among the misses. 
 
 34. At the game of commerce, losing your life in fishing for aces, 
 when you had hooked two, and the third had several times nibbled at 
 your bait 
 
 35. When there is a very rich pool, and you have outlived all the 
 players but one, he having gone up twice, and you not once losing all 
 your three lives running. 
 
 Tes. Nay, commerce is the best game upon the cards ; for 
 you may get yourself released whenever you please. What 
 say you to the case of a wretch who detests cards, and whist 
 above all, at which he plays vilely. Under these circum- 
 stances, I say, what think you of 
 
 36. Being compelled, by the want of a substitute, to sit down again, 
 as you are stealing away, to a fourth or fifth rubber, with an Argus in 
 the shape of a captious, eager, skilful, elderly spinster for your new 
 partner? 
 
 37. In shuffling the cards your party all strangers squashing them 
 together, breaking their edges, and showering them in all directions, so as 
 to make you long for a trap-door to open under your feet 
 
 38. A pack of cards which stick so abominably in dealing, that you 
 unavoidably throw out three or four at once, and so lose your time, your 
 patience, and the deal. 
 
 39. Being accompanied by a player or singer, who is always at least 
 a bar behind or before you.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 37 
 
 The arts. "Music hath (c) harms." Drawing. A point . disappoint 
 
 Ned Tes. There is a bar to the harmony, but no harmony 
 to the bar. 
 
 40. To listen to a set of badly-played chimes Old Hundred altered, 
 because there are but eight bells to play it with. A " triple bob major" 
 rung as if it were the " passing bell" 
 
 Ned Tes. In that case, every bar is a toll-bar. 
 
 41. While accompanying another on the flute, being distanced in a 
 quick passage by having to turn over in the middle of a bar. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " And panting time toil'd after him in vaia" JOHNS. 
 
 42. Attempting, by desire, to play on the pianoforte, while your fingers 
 are all chained up by the frost 
 
 43. In fiddling a greasy bow ; or a string, the last you have of the 
 number, snapping in the middle of a passage which you were just discov- 
 ering the proper method of fingering. 
 
 Sen. No, sir, music will never do. Drawing is, at least, 
 a quieter enemy ; but that it is an enemy, we shall easily 
 make appear. 
 
 Tes. Not so fast, sir ; I have another musical misery in 
 store. 
 
 44. After waiting an hour for a friend's cremona, for which you had 
 sent your servant, seeing it at length brought in by him in fragments. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 Sen. Nay, young gentleman, if you are to quote so, you 
 may as well throw in " Nusquam tuta fides" as you, sir, (to 
 old Testy,) ought to have remembered in proper time. 
 
 46. Hitching your knife in the gritty flaws of a black-lead pencil so as 
 to spoil its edge, without gaining your point : repeatedly breaking said
 
 38 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 -An unwelcome mental guest is a riddle which is not guessed. 
 
 point in the operation of cutting it ; or, when you seem to have succeeded, 
 finding that your pencil only scratches the paper on which you mean to 
 draw. 
 
 46. After having nearly completed a drawing of a head, on which you 
 have long been working very laboriously, leaving the room for a moment, 
 and finding, on your return, that a sudden puff of wind, as you opened the 
 door, has conveyed it into the fire, which is devouring the last corner of 
 the paper. 
 
 47. In fitting a drawing to its frame, becoming so tired of your own 
 timidity in paring the paper too little, as to spoil all by one rash sliver. 
 
 48. Rubbing Indian-ink or cake colours in a very smooth saucer. (Or, 
 what is far worse than this nay, is perhaps the very mightiest of all the 
 mighty miseries we are now recording, or shall ever record ) 
 
 49. As you draw to be maddened, through your whole work, with 
 inveterate greasiness in your pencils, colours, or paper you cannot possi- 
 bly discover which so that what you have taken up with your brush 
 keeps coyly flying from the spot to which you would apply it. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " nee color 
 
 Certa sede manet" HOK. 
 
 Tes. So much for the Fine Arts ! One misery more, and 
 I have done for the present. 
 
 60. Exhausting your faculties for a whole evening together in vain en- 
 deavours to guess at a riddle, conundrum, <tc, though you are assured, all 
 the time, that it is as easy as the a, b, c. 
 
 Tes. For my own part, the confounded riddle with which 
 I have just wound up my accounts, has considerably short- 
 ened my search after other torments ; for ever since it was 
 proposed to me, a full month ago, I have lost both my rest 
 and my appetite, and neglected almost every other concern 
 in trying to find it out all to no purpose.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN Lli-'R. 39 
 
 Riddle* in the old sense, i. e., sieves to strain the faculties. 
 
 I have done double duty besides. First, to make out 
 \vhat the answer could be, and then, when the idiot had told 
 it to me, to find what possible sense or connection it had with 
 the question ! 
 
 Ned TVs. (aside to the reader.) I was the idiot in question. 
 The riddle was : " Why should not the Latin ' Me Ipse 1 be con- 
 sidered a strong expression?" "Because it only takes ' 2" to 
 make ' Me Tipse!'" 
 
 Sen. Nay, let it pass ; you and I have neither time nor 
 tranquillity for studying riddles. Besides, sir, life itself ac- 
 cording to our views of it is one great enigma ; and, like the 
 other famous enigma of old, is guarded by not one, but a 
 thousand sphinxes, in the shape of "miseries," which, like their 
 predecessor, keep tearing us to pieces all the time that we are 
 labouring in vain for the solution. Be quiet, then, for a mo- 
 ment, while I shape out other employment for us. It will 
 not be denied, I trust, that we have now given the cause of 
 the country a fair hearing ; but (he town, remember, will be 
 thought to have at least an equal right to be put upon its 
 trial, and the rather, as men, having made it themselves, will 
 be naturally interested by the vanity of workmen in its 
 defence. 
 
 Tes. So be it. " Man made the town," and we will pat- 
 ronize the manufactured article, skipping over the whole vil- 
 lage tribe as a wretched nondescript, to be attributed to 
 neither not made at all, in fact. A sort of accidental spon- 
 taneous production. 
 
 Sen. A collection of people not too large for every body 
 to know all about every body else, yet not large enough 
 for any selection of associates ; large enough to preclude 
 mutual interest, yet small enough for universal curiosity, is 
 a despicable state of existence ! We will treat fearlessly
 
 40 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Finish of " Miseries Chap. 2d." (They've finished many a chap besides !) 
 
 of city and country, but leave the village to the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 Ned Tes. Given, the extremes to find the mean. 
 
 Sen. Capital, Ned, for once ! The mean verily ! not even 
 worthy of being recorded ! 
 
 Tes. Very well. Chapter third will resume the same sub- 
 ject in another phase. 
 
 Ned Tes. As one is sure to find in the middle of any inter- 
 esting story in an old magazine
 
 TJ1K MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 41 
 
 Miseries of cities noisome and noisy. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Miseries of cities noisome and noisy. 'Ere's a noise annoys the ears. Mutual 
 awkwardness, i. e., awkwardness that makes you all mate. The difficulty of mak- 
 ing some things come to pa. Wakefulness. Wo only find oblivion when we 
 wish to be remembered I Cizft-bace, in the tailor sense. A fare presumption. 
 Flambeaux, i. e., fiery young gentlemen. A new po(l)ker. A toss-up for choice 
 of partners. " Voices of tho night" A feline misery, and a feelin' description of 
 it. When may a story be said to be " going the rounds" ? When the bricks it 
 was built of are being brought down a ladder. The folly of using an income for 
 amusing a nincom. Theatres, Ac. Places of public abusement. "Going to 
 ballet-hack" not so easy for a common man as for a fool. The misery of condol- 
 ence. Is it a bad box to have no box at all ? The close of the drama. 
 
 Tes. Welcome to New York, friend Sensitive ! and still 
 more welcome to this quiet room can you hear me 1 
 
 Sen. If I cannot, this constant and cheerful noise of carts 
 and stages, which is said by some to favor conversation, will 
 help me out, I suppose. 
 
 Tes. If a man must be stunned before he can hear, the 
 deaf should lose no time in coming up to here! But how 
 long have you been in this elysium of brick and mortar 1 
 and what have you seen 1 
 
 Sen. Seen ! I am so full of what I have heard, that I 
 hardly know ; for, of all my organs, my ear, I think, torments 
 me most ; and yet, I beg pardon of my nose, which, in New 
 York, seems still more earnestly bent on my destruction. 
 
 Tes. I give you joy, however, for having found out that ; 
 there is some comfort in knowing which of your five servants 
 is least busy in plotting against its master. As to me, the 
 conspiracy is so nicely balanced among them, that I would
 
 42 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 'Ere's & noise annoys the ears. 
 
 give half a dime to be able to determine the ringleader. All 
 I know is, that whenever they may finish me, there will be 
 some of my blood at each of their doors. But you seemed 
 just now as if you were going to be very eloquent upon. 
 noises in particular. Any thing much worse than usual in that 
 line? 
 
 Sen. O, yes, if possible. In an evil hour I lately changed 
 lodgings, to escape from a brazier at the next door, who 
 counted his profits so very distinctly upon the drums of my 
 ears, that not thinking myself indemnified by the value of the 
 intelligence for the loss of my hearing, I took wing at a mo- 
 ment's warning ; the only consequence, however, has been 
 that of exchanging one old enemy for a thousand new ones. 
 What is a single brazier to a legion of brazen throats ? But 
 1 anticipate it is time to go to business, and I will lead the 
 way, if you please, with a " misery" which will too fully an- 
 swer your last question. (Sensitive produces his memoranda 
 and reads:) 
 
 1. While you are harmlessly reading or writing in a room which fronts 
 the street, being compelled to undergo a savage jargon of yells, bells, and 
 screams : 
 
 " Bombalio, clangor, stridor, tarantantara, murmur T ' 
 Ash-carmen, rag-carmen, charcoal-carmen 
 
 Ned Tes. Carmen lamentabile, triste, lugubre 
 
 Newsboys, scissors-grinders, or, to cap the climax, organ-grinders 1 
 
 Ned Tes. Sharpeners of the organ of hearing, these last. 
 
 2. You have, all the while, no interest whatever in the uproar, ex- 
 cept in the character of a sufferer. For even if you were anxious to buy 
 what they are anxious to sell, you would be prevented by your incapabil- 
 ity of acquiring even a smattering of the language in which their goods
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 43 
 
 Mutual awkwardness, L e., awkwardness that makes you all mute. 
 
 are -uttered. And thus is a new nuM-rv .-truck out for you, from your in- 
 dignation at their distorted ingenuity in devising stratagems for their own 
 ruin, which must be the direct consequence of their uniutelligibility. 
 
 3. After walking in a great hurry to a place on very urgent business, 
 by what you think a shorter cut, and supposing that you are just arriving 
 at the door you want "JVo thoroughfare? 
 
 Sen. Not to mention the misery of turning back, splashing 
 along at full speed, and fighting your way through the crowd ; 
 and all this, in order to go the longest way round, and be too 
 late at last ! 
 
 4. Stopping in the street to address a person whom you know rather 
 too well to pass him without speaking, and yet not quite well enough to 
 have a word to say to him he feeling himself in the same dilemma so 
 that, after each lias asked and answered the question, "How do you do, 
 sir ?" you stand silently face to face, apropos to nothing, during a minute, 
 and then part in a transport of 'awkwardness. 
 
 5. Stumbling through New York streets in pumps (and the winter,) 
 over hills of filthy snow, in the beginning of a great thaw, and occasionally 
 passing over a wide, floated crossing, closely accompanied by a hopping 
 sweeper, who whining begs at you all the way : no penny. 
 
 6. A bad Sunday in the city. 
 
 
 
 7. Walking side by side with a cart containing a million of iron bars, 
 
 which you must outbray, if you can, in order to make your companion 
 hear a word you have further to say upon the subject you were earnestly 
 discussing before you were joined by this infernal article of commerce. 
 
 8. While you are peaceably reading your paper at a coffee-house, two 
 friends, perfect strangers to you, squatting themselves down at your right 
 and left hand, and talking across you for an hour, over their private con- 
 cerns. 
 
 9. While on a short visit on business the hurry and ferment, the 
 crossing and jostling, the missing and marring, which incessantly happen 
 among all your engagements, purposes, and promises, both of business and
 
 44 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The difficulty of making some tilings come to pass. 
 
 pleasure, at home and abroad, from morning till midnight obstacles 
 equally perverse, unexpected, unaccountable, innumerable, and intolerable, 
 springing up like mushrooms, through every step of your progresa Then, 
 when you are at last leaving, on asking yourself the question whether 
 any thing has been neglected or forgotten, receiving for answer " Almost 
 every thing F . . 
 
 10. As you are walking with your charmer, meeting a drunken sailor, 
 who, as he staggers by you, ejects his reserve of tobacco against the lady's 
 drapery. 
 
 Now, is not this too much, sir 1 
 
 Ned Tes. Yes, that's exactly what it is ; and therefore you 
 should have cried out in time 
 
 " Ne QUID nigh miss I" 
 
 11. "Walking briskly forwards, while you are looking backwards, and 
 BO advancing towards another passenger, who is doing the same ; then, 
 meeting with the shock of two battering-rams, which drives your whole 
 stock of breath out of your body with the groan of a pavior : 
 
 Dant sonitu ingentem, perfractaque .... 
 Pectora pectoribus rumpunt" * 
 
 At length, after a mutual burst of execrations, you each move for several 
 minutes from side to side, with the same motion, in endeavouring to 
 pass on. 
 
 12. In going out to dinner, (already too late,) your carriage delayed 
 by a jam of coaches 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 Jam,jamque magis cunctantem ! 
 
 Which choke up the whole street, and allow you at least an hour more 
 than you require to sharpen your wits for table talk. 
 
 * " Breast against breast, with ruinous assault 
 And deaf uing shock, they come."
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 45 
 
 Wakefulness. "We only find oblivion when we wish to be remembered I 
 
 Ned Tes. You went to meat with friends you did meet 
 with obstructions ! 
 
 13. On your entrance at a formal dinner party in reaching up your 
 hat to a high peg in the hall, bursting your coat, from the arm-hole to the 
 pocket 
 
 Tes. Aye that comes of " appetens nimis ardua," you 
 see. 
 
 14. On leaving the house, at which you have been visiting, finding that 
 a rascal has taken your new hat, and left you his old one ; which, on the 
 one hand, either cuts to your skull, if you press it down, or barely perches 
 on the tip of your head if you do not ; or, on the other hand, wabbles over 
 your eyes and ears, and keeps bobbing on your nose ; to say nothing of 
 wearing another man's hat, even if it fitted like a glove. 
 
 1 5. At night, after having long lain awake, nervous and unwell, with an 
 ardent desire to know the hour, and the state of the weather, being, at last, 
 delighted by hearing the watchman begin his cry, from which, however, he 
 allows you to extract no more information than " past clock morning !" 
 Then, after impatiently lingering through another hour for the sound of 
 your own clock, (which had before been roared down by the watchman,) 
 being roused to listen by its preparatory click and purr, followed by one 
 stroke, which you are to make the most of, the rest being cut short by a 
 violent fit of coughing, with which you are seized on the instant 
 
 1 6. In attempting to pay money in the street emptying your purse 
 into the kennel the wind taking care of all the paper money. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " The trembling notes ascend the sky !" ALEX FEAST. 
 
 17. Standing off and on in the street, for half an hour, (though in the 
 utmost haste,) while the friend with whom you are walking talks to his 
 friend, whom you meet, and to whose conversation you are delicately 
 doubtful whether you ought to be a party. 
 
 18. The Mwintermitting fever into which you are thrown by being 
 obliged to linger, the whole morning long, amongst a crew of " greasy
 
 46 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Caft-bage, in the tailor sense. A fare presumption. 
 
 rogues," 1 in the outer room of a public office, from which you are called out 
 the last, if, indeed, you are called out at all ! 
 
 19. Chasing your hat, (just blown off in a high wind,) through a muddy 
 street a fresh gust always whisking it away at the moment of seizing it ; 
 when you have at last caught it, deliberately putting it on, with all its sins 
 upon your head, amidst the jeers of the populace. 
 
 20. Going to the House of Representatives, in high expectation of an 
 animated debate ; and after standing, like an idiot, five hours in the lobby, 
 and sitting five more in the gallery no business done ! Also, being re- 
 peatedly and roughly turned out of the gallery (like a duty dog out of a 
 parlor) on motions for executive session, or something else you don't under- 
 stand ; and as often shifted, on your return, to a worse place than you had 
 before. 
 
 21. Running the gauntlet through South street, from Fulton to White- 
 hall 
 
 22. Ditto through Fulton market, in the dog-days, the odors of the 
 meat acting as a thermometer to the nose. 
 
 23. Accosting a person in the street with the utmost familiarity, shak- 
 ing him long and cordially by the hand, feo, and at length discovering by 
 his cold (or, if he is a fool, angry) stare, that he is not the man you took 
 him for. 
 
 Sen. Or, what is a somewhat similar source of agony 
 
 24. Finding that the person with whom you thus claim acquaintance 
 has entirely forgotten you, though you perfectly remember him. 
 
 Tes. Aye as Persius says, 
 
 " Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te sciat alter."* 
 
 25. On going in a coach to the depot, from which you are to set out on 
 a long journey, being asked by the coachman three or four times more than 
 his fare, which he knows you must pay, as you have not a moment's leisure 
 
 " To know thyself is nothing unless others know thee."
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 47 
 
 Flambeaux, 1. e., flery young gentlemen. 
 
 ti> summon him at th- tinif. while, on your return, it would be too late 
 in due consideration of all which, he further indulges himself in iusuleut 
 language. 
 
 26. As you walk the streets on the evening of the 4th of July, a 
 rrni-krr thrown into your pocket by some miscliievous little rascal, who 
 instantly runs away ; then, in your hasty attempt to .-natch it out, feeling 
 it burst in your hand, leaving your handkerchief in flames. 
 
 Tes. Yes, and leaving you in the flames, too, at being dis- 
 appointed of your vengeance against the young villain : 
 
 " Ssevit atrox nee teli conspieit unquam 
 
 Auctorem, nee qu6 se, ardens, immittere possit" Vmo. 
 
 2*7. In taking out your money in an omnibus, dropping the greatest 
 part of it (and all the gold) in the straw ; then, after grubbing and fum- 
 bling after it for an hour, finding nothing but the gaping crevices through 
 which it must have escaped. 
 
 28. Treading in a beautrap,* while in the act of gaily pausing to make 
 a bow to some charming woman of your acquaintance, whom you suddenly 
 meet, and to whom you liberally impart a share of thejetcteau. 
 
 29. As you walk forth, freshly and sprucely dressed, receiving in full, 
 at a sharp turning, the filthy flirtings of a wet broom. 
 
 Tes. Ah ! the jade ! Juvenal had never been submitted 
 to Ihis mode of irrigation, when he said 
 
 "Nemo repentb fit turpissimus." f 
 
 30. A stripling at the next door learning to play upon the fife or fid- 
 dle, and (besides other enormities in his practice) catching, as you play 
 them, all your favorite airs, which he returns to you in every possible 
 key and time, excepting the right, and not excepting the night 
 
 * A stone, dry on top, but insecurely poised in a puddle of wet 
 f " No one becomes vile instantaneously."
 
 48 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A new po (1) ker. A toss-up for choice of partners 
 
 81. As you are quietly walking along in the Bowery, finding yourself 
 eudilenly obliged, though your dancing days have been long over, to lead 
 out-i(i .-, cross over, foot it, and a variety of other steps and figures, with 
 mad bulls for your partners. 
 
 Ned Tea. The music being arranged for horns. 
 
 32. Being accelerated in your walk by the lively application of a hand- 
 cart a posteriori ; the " by your leave" not coming till after it is taken. 
 
 33. Your hat, and part of your head, poked off from behind, without 
 notice or apology, by a huge beam, or sign, or ladder, a quarter of a mile in 
 length, as its bearers blindly blunder along with it 
 
 "GOING THE BOUNDS." 
 
 Sen. O, intolerable ! A Quaker at court is far better off; 
 for, though Ms hat is lugged off by others unceremoniously 
 enough, yet, I understand, they always make a point of leav- 
 ing all the head behind. 
 
 34. During the endless time that you are kept waiting at a door in a 
 carriage, while the ladies are shopping, having your impatience soothed by 
 the setting of a saw, close at your ear.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 49 
 
 " Voices of the night." A feline misery, and a feelin' description of it 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " From the table of my memory 
 I'll wipe away all saws." SIIAK. 
 
 Sen. I have listened to those horrible things sometimes, 
 till it seemed as if my ear would drop off. 
 
 Ned Tes. The saw-sir was set to catch your ear, in view 
 of such a catastrophe, like the fish with his dish in the affect- 
 ing history of the death of Cock Robin. 
 
 Sen. Speaking of catastrophe, reminds me of another hear- 
 ing misery not uncommon in New York. 
 
 35. To be kept awake by a convivial party of cats making love on the 
 house-tops, which they do in such a feline sort of way that it is difficult to 
 distinguish it from making war. Then when you have borne it to the 
 limit of mortal endurance, to get up and make a martyr of yourself 
 in the cold, throwing away all your old boots and a hair-brush out of the 
 scuttle without any permanent or visible effect. 
 
 Ned Tes. In such a case you would like to have had a 
 cat as trophy to show for your exploit. 
 
 Sen. Many and various are the assaults peaceable sleep is 
 subject to in the city. / never can get to sleep again after 
 being once waked up. 
 
 Ned Tes. Yours is.' no* a piece-able sleep then. 
 
 Sen. In view of that, no doubt, and to improve my habits 
 of industry, faj;e has ordained that I should be roused at day- 
 Jight every morning in the week except Sunday by the bell 
 of a factory of some sort within two blocks of me. 
 
 Ned Tes. You do not know what sort of a factory it be- 
 longs to, except that it is not a serais-factory bell, I suppose. 
 
 Tes. Whenever there is an alarm of fire in our district, an 
 infernal machine, manned, or rather >oy'c?, by a parcel of evil 
 spirits, comes thundering past my door. 
 
 3
 
 50 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 When may s story be said to be "going the rounds" ? 
 
 Ned Tes. The engine is boy'd by the spirits, and the 
 spirits are buoyed by the noise. The fact is, they make a 
 regular frolic of it ; so you can say you are roused by the 
 lark, which is rather poetical. 
 
 Sen. I often think how natural it is that the owners of 
 those voices should be firemen. It must excite tender remi- 
 niscences of the home of their fathers, and give them a vivid 
 and realizing sense of their birthright, heritage, and ultimate 
 destination -for they must be fiends incarnate. 
 
 Tes. Here is a misery that is of continual application in 
 New York, where, as a general rule, they always tear down 
 a house as soon as the mortar is dry with which it was built. 
 Ned* Tes. Unless it tumbles down in the mean time to 
 the great relief of the owners, and the great disgust of the 
 people inside. 
 
 36. Crouching and crawling through the scaffoldings, ladders, rubbish, 
 flying smother, tumbling bricks, <fco, of a house half pulled down and all 
 this without having made your will 
 
 Ned Tes. With a possibility of being laid as low by the 
 descent of a brick on your hat, as if the said " brick" were 
 inside thereof. 
 
 Sen. And what a wretched spectacle a house in process 
 of demolition is ! It is a misery in itself to look at one. 
 After the front has departed, the floors and sides remaining 
 look like a gigantic set of shelves ; and if it is a dwelling- 
 house, it seems like witnessing a dissection, to see its pene- 
 tralia uncovered and laid bare. Far up and conspicuous, all 
 may gaze at the inside walls and paper-hanging, (hanging, in- 
 deed, now,) that have looked down silently on so many scenes 
 in the domestic history of its successive occupants, and even 
 the very fireplaces, still black with the smoke of the fuel that
 
 THE MISERIES OF Him AN LIFE. 51 
 
 When the bricks it was built of are being brought down a ladder. 
 
 wanned the inmates when the room had four sides and nobody 
 could see into it ! 
 
 Tes. That may all be very fine, but it is of more conse- 
 quence to me that the lazy Irishmen, to save themselves a 
 little trouble, have extended a pathway from the parlor 
 windows to the top of their brick pile in the street, so that all 
 persons must either dive under, like fish, or fly over, like 
 birds, or walk round the brick pile in the mud like fools 
 though no one is enough interested to swear a complaint 
 against them as a nuisance. 
 
 Ned Tes. Unless swearing profane oaths would answer. 
 
 Tes. And so here, I perceive, we are both shutting up our 
 black books. 
 
 Sen. Yes. Well, then, Mr. Testy, are any of these ad- 
 ventures, think you, likely to remove the impressions under 
 which we came together ? 
 
 Tes. Remove them ! I will soon show you my opinion 
 on that point, by hurrying out of town to-morrow morning ; 
 for vile as the country is in most respects, yet, to give it its 
 due, you can generally breathe the air you can hear your- 
 self speak, though there is nobody to speak to there is no 
 bad smell in some of the flowers you can see an inch before 
 your nose and you can bear to look at your hands for at 
 least half an hour after you have washed them. How hos- 
 pitably the five senses are entertained in the city, we have 
 pretty well seen. 
 
 Sen. But you know, Testy, we ought to look into the 
 city's entertainments on the same principle that we used up 
 the games, sports, and amusements out of town. Let us go 
 and hunt them all up, and make a chapter of them. 
 
 Tes. Not I. I'm not going to make a martyr of myself 
 to the cause. There are. plenty of victims to the miseries of
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The folly of using an income for amusing a nincom. 
 
 human life involuntary ones. (Aside, with a jerk over his 
 shoulder meant to designate Mrs. T. and the nursery. You 
 know my outlays in that line must be multiplied by three or 
 four.) No, no, Sensitive ! I am not going to pay down one- 
 half of my income to be able to say, from personal expe- 
 rience, that the pleasantest moment to be found in the 
 pleasantest place of amusement, is that in which you emerge 
 from the door crowded, jammed, stunned, and painful though 
 it be. 
 
 Ned Tes. With wrings on your fingers (and every where 
 else) and belles on your toes, no doubt. 
 
 Sen. Well, I'll " sacrifice my private interest to the public 
 good," as a desperate office-seeker always says on receiving 
 a nomination he has tried for tremendously ; I'll bell the 
 cat ; Til make a crusader of myself address myself to the 
 task as heartily as may be and throw myself into every 
 breach. 
 
 Ned Tcs. (aside.) A new style of dressing throwing one's 
 self into the breeches. 
 
 Tes. No, no ! I have no idea of letting you perish un- 
 timely in that style, especially with our work only half done 
 by being well 'begun. For such would be the effect of such 
 a course of treatment. 
 
 Ned Tes. I wish some of my enemies w*ould tak^T a 
 fancy to make a martyr of me that same way. I'd be re- 
 signed to visit all the public amusements in succession, if 
 necessary. 
 
 Sen. O, don't be so much concerned about me. To be 
 sure, I should be very miserable ; but then, you kflow, if it 
 was a duty pious fortitude, &c. 
 
 Tes. Do not say any more about it, Sensitive, or I shall 
 think the cause is in more danger of losing you hi another
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFK. 53 
 
 Theatres, Ac. Places of public abtMement. 
 
 way. Let us set down what few miseries occur to us in that 
 line, and let the rest go. 
 
 Ned Tes. If there was to be a chapter, I'd be the chap to 
 do it, and suffer it. 
 
 87. After tremendous efforts to get up a party for the theatre, where 
 there is a play only every other night, to find that you had made a mis- 
 tiike of one day in your calculations. 
 
 Ned Tes. " All work and no play" with a vengeance. 
 
 38. The first time of hearing an opera by a non-musical ear, when it is 
 " all sound and fury, signifying nothing" except an air or two you have 
 heard before. 
 
 Ned Tes. There are some operas a little misnamed. For 
 opera, read uproar. 
 
 89. On going to the play to see a favorite performer, to be told, at 
 the drawing up of the curtain as you bad augured from the rueful bow 
 of the speaker that he, or she, is suddenly taken ill, or dead, and that 
 
 Mr. , or Miss , the hacks of the house, has kindly undertaken 
 
 to try to read the part at five minutes' notice. 
 
 40. In the pit, at the opera, a broad-shouldered fellow, seven feet high, 
 seated immediately before you during the whole of the ballet 
 
 41. While sitting in a front row of the front boxes, -during the deepest 
 part of the tragedy, yourself and friends suddenly required to stand up 
 and crowd back upon each other, while you hold up the seat for a large 
 pfrfty in procession, who take up twenty minutes in getting down to their 
 places, in one of which you had seated yourself by mistake, and conse- 
 quently are now turned out, and have to tread back your way into the 
 lobby, over the laps of ladies, without a chance for another seat. 
 
 42. At a concert, as you are preparing to listen to one of the Nightin- 
 gale's best songs, being suddenly environed by a crew of savages, whose 
 laughter tod gabble are all that you are allowed to hear. 
 
 43. After the ballet, on a raw, wet night, with a party of ladies
 
 54 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 " Going to ballet-hack" not so easy for a common man as for a fool. 
 
 fretting and freezing in the outer lobbies and at the street-doors of the 
 theatre, among cabmen and other human refuse, in endless attempts to 
 find out your carriage, which, when found at last, cannot be drawn up 
 nearer than a furlong from tlie door. 
 
 44. Pushing in with an immense crowd at a narrow door, through 
 which such another crowd is pushing out : thermometer at 95 or '6. 
 
 45. After the play, to be detained with your party in the house, on a 
 frosty night, till the last of the company, as well as of the light-*, are 
 gone out. 
 
 46. Your feelings put to the rack throughout the most moving scenes 
 of a deep tragedy by a riotous rascal in the upper gallery, w r ho will not, 
 for a moment suffer his neighbors to cry in peace ; while you are per- 
 petually tantalized with neglected proposals from the tender-hearted part 
 of the audience to " throw him over !" 
 
 47. Your opera-glass which had been perfectly clear while there 
 was nothing in the house worth spying at becoming obstinately dim at 
 the moment when you have pointed it towards an enchanting creature 
 who has just entered. 
 
 48. Sitting on the last row and close to the partition of an upper box 
 at a pantomime, and hearing all the house laughing around you, while you 
 strain your wrists, neck, and back with stretching forward in vain. 
 
 49. In the pit, at the opera, turning briskly rouud, on hearing a box- 
 door open close by you, in hopes of feasting your eyes on some young 
 angel whom you expect to appear, and beholding, instead of her, that sort 
 of hideous, old, crabbed-looking crone of fashion, whose face is as full of 
 wrinkles as her head is of diamonds. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Who, like the toad, ugly and venomous, 
 Wears yet a precious jewel in her head." SHAK. 
 
 50. Those parts of the entertainment at the circus which do not con- 
 sist of pranks or horsemanship.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 55 
 
 The misery of condolence. 
 
 51. Sitting with au excruciating headache to see a vile play acted by 
 viler performers, for the eighth or tenth time, in a crowded back row, with 
 a dull party, in August 
 
 Sen. -To be one of & frightfully small number gathered to 
 witness any exhibition, is worse than almost any crowd. In 
 fuct, to be present at any conspicuously unsuccessful public 
 effort is one of my most uncomfortable experiences. The 
 fates seem not to be satisfied with making man uncomfort- 
 able on his own account, but he must be uncomfortable for 
 all the world, and without doing all the world any good 
 thereby ! 
 
 Tes. Sympathy in cases of mortification is a great blunder, 
 but not a very common one. 
 
 Sen. No mistake could be greater than to suppose that 
 condolence is any alleviation of that sort of unhappiness. For 
 if you analyze matters closely, you will find that the fear of 
 having excited that sentiment is the very thing that distresses. 
 Any one can stand brutal, open-mouthed ridicule, but the sus- 
 picion of an effort at considerate self-restraint in others (no 
 matter how successful) is torture to the person out of regard 
 for whom it is exercised. 
 
 52. The endless interval which sometimes passes between the play 
 and farce, and this while you are sitting by a lady whom you consider it 
 as your duiy to entertain, but who does not consider it as her duty to be 
 entertained, and still lees, to requite your attempts in kind. 
 
 53. Wading through those gossiping scenes of a play in which the 
 lackeys and waiting-maids lay their heads together about the plans and 
 characters of their masters and mistresses; or that part of the opera io 
 
 which Signer and Signora (we all know who) fill up the 
 
 void, while the stars are refreshing themselves behind the scenes. 
 
 54. After having paid a high premium for a place in some concert
 
 56 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Is it a bad box to have no box at all ? 
 
 where seats are in great request, to find that it has been disposed of, by 
 
 mistake, to the Hon. Mr. , or General somebody. Then, to be 
 
 offered, on application to the managers, the money they received for the 
 place not by any means the money you paid to the speculator you bought 
 your ticket of. 
 
 Ned Tes. Your title (to the place) was good ; but the Gen- 
 eral's (to his name) was more potent. 
 
 Tes. I can't think you have chosen your happiest misery 
 for the last, or, rather, I won't allow it to be any misery at 
 all ; for as your pleasure must have lain in getting out of 
 these enchanting places as fast as possible, (though for a par- 
 ticular purpose you had bound yourself to go into them,) you 
 ought, I think, to have considered it as a high stroke of good 
 luck to have thus reconciled the satisfaction of having at- 
 tempted to do your duty, with the still higher satisfaction of 
 leaving it undone. For to fetch a parallel case out of the 
 Eoman history if old Regulus's opinion could be taken upon 
 his own affair, I fancy he would tell us that, though he thought 
 it became him to keep his word by returning to Carthage, for 
 the purpose of occupying that teizing tub which the carpenter 
 had fitted up for his reception, he would have been quite as 
 well pleased if he had found, on his arrival, that it had just 
 been let out, "by mistake," to another gentleman ! 
 
 Sen. Capital ! But you've not heard my last yet. 
 
 55. To finish off an evening spent in delights of this sort by coming 
 home to a house closed to any appeal you can make. 
 
 Ned Tes. A peal or a score of peals, on bell and knocker 
 included. 
 
 56. Windows fly up, and alarmed faces in hideous nightcaps crop out 
 on all sides. Every body seems to be awake except the servant who sat 
 up by the kitchen fire to admit you. He, in the mean time, is just dream-
 
 THE MISERIES OF JIUMAN LIFE. 
 
 57 
 
 The close of the drama. 
 
 ing that he lias been to the theatre, and is trying to knock up the house to 
 let him in. This goes on of course indefinitely. The time seems inter- 
 minable. Your patienco is exhausted, and your demonstrations become 
 more and more forcible ; but the resounding blows only enter into their 
 appropriate niches in the sleeper's dream ; and he lias the impudence to 
 get quite angry in it, that nobody pays any attention to him ! 
 
 Ned Tes. I should be tempted to put an end to my suffer- 
 ings l>y an appeal to 
 
 THE STATUTE OF LIMB-HIT-ATIONS." 
 
 3*
 
 58 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Miseries of travelling. " Voyager c'est vivre." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Miseries of travelling. " Voyager c'est vivre." Literal people a pest. A dig at the 
 dignitaries. Travelling preliminaries. Pick np and pack up. Pilgrim's Progress. 
 Boxing the clothes and closing the box. Obliging friends, i. e., friends who oblige 
 you to accommodate them. A memorandum-book, "Though lost to sight, to 
 memory dear." The poetical "bark," like Peruvian bark, nauseous enough in 
 reality. A pout mortem examination connected with the dead tetter office. 
 Railroads, beginning with a depot-sition on the nuisance of starting. The whistle 
 a car-tune preliminary to a picture of despair. Inn for it, with a vengeance. 
 A stir-up to the placidity of your temper, already saddley tried. Drivers. The 
 only stage-managers who don't get disgusted with the dram(a). The pest the 
 dam-pest of damp sheets. " I love a softer climb" than the upper berth, " Gents' 
 Cabin." Transpositions, a new epidemic. Inoculation for the reader. Mean im- 
 position not in position to be resented. Light is the smoker's care if he only has 
 a cigar ! A feet-id odor. What boots it to complain ? " Pleasure rowed a fairy -boat." 
 What rode a ferry-boat ? Cattle damages. The joint-stock having to pay for the dis- 
 jointed. Official appointments. Miserable sticks elevated to responsible pouts. 
 
 Sen. It is an uncommonly pleasant thing to dream of 
 travelling. To lie down after dinner and read yourself to 
 sleep, and dream of going over the prairies to the Rocky 
 Mountains, if the book is Irving's Astoria ; of exploring the 
 Holy Land, if it is Stephens's ; or of going to England, if you 
 are reading, or ever have read any thing. To dream of all 
 this, I say, has as little of misery in it, and therefore would 
 seem about as barren ground for the research particularly 
 allotted to us, as any state of existence in the whole unhappy 
 round of human experience. But 
 
 " Das ungluck schreitet schneU," 
 
 Misfortune courses fast. It seems like tempting Providence 
 like making a jest of misfortune this journeying mentally
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 59 
 
 Literal people a pest. A dig at the dignitaries. 
 
 and self-indulging corporeally, for we do not know how soon 
 we may be on a real journey ! 
 
 Tes. Yes ; it is like playing with edge tools, (which an old 
 adage warns nearly all humanity against,) to allow such 
 thoughts to come into your head. You may unguardedly 
 think aloud. 
 
 Ned Tes. Which is not allowed in good society. 
 
 Tes. Suppose you say, " I'll go to Oregon to Petra to 
 Oxford," and are overheard by one of those pests of society, 
 literal people, you may set it down as a fixed fact, that you 
 are going, and that the sooner it is, the sooner he will stop 
 asking you when it is to be. 
 
 Sen. Do you know, Testy, I had fixed on that very 
 species of the genus bore for a " misery V A jackass, who 
 can allow no figure of speech which cannot be mathematically 
 demonstrated by figures of arithmetic who is always ready 
 to spoil a good after-dinner story, no matter of how little 
 consequence to the company is its correctness, or even 
 veracity 
 
 Ned Tes. " Scourge of the dessert" such a man might be 
 called, in Arabian metaphor. 
 
 Sen. Ready and willing to restrain the laugh, while he 
 asks an explanation of some inconsistency the relator is per- 
 fectly willing the hearer should arrange to suit himself. 
 
 Tes. And a laugh laid on the table in that way is as 
 effectually spoiled, lost, annihilated, dead and buried and for- 
 gotten, as a resolution of inquiry into some abuse laid on the 
 table of the Board of Aldermen. 
 
 Sen. " Good friend, for mercy's sake forbear !" Let us allot, 
 in some proper place, ten chapters to an epitome of the subjects 
 of complaint^ connected with the misgovernment of the city 
 of New York. When you get on that board, we are afloat 
 
 I
 
 60 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Travelling preliminaries. Pick up and pack up, 
 
 Ned Tes. The board of Alder-men ought to contain the 
 pith of the city. * 
 
 Sen. And when we board the common council, our chapter 
 of travelling miseries is " lodged and done for" indefinitely. 
 Shun the flattering contest ; strive against the temptation as 
 you would against a pestilence, or, rather, as they would 
 i. e., by running resolutely away. Let us plunge in medias 
 res of the subject in hand, which is certainly a rich enough 
 " gulch." Pack up ! There's a mine of discomfort in the 
 very sound. All those little nothings that make up the life of 
 the sedentary that are good enough for the habit-life the 
 anxious glance of the prospective traveller sees grow three 
 years older in a single morning ; and this metamorphosis is 
 the first phenomenon you perceive by the "extended views" 
 you set out to acquire. 
 
 Tes. I find, and I suppose every one finds, on getting 
 ready for a journey, that there is scarcely an article of per- 
 sonal property that would not be indispensable in some 
 juncture which his imagination conjures up. 
 
 Sen. Certainly. But at the same time he won't have 
 much baggage that every man determines just as regularly 
 as he resolves he won't be sea-sick, and is just as regularly 
 made to eat his words. 
 
 Ned Tes. An -uncommonly nauseous diet they make 
 especially in the case of sea-sickness. 
 
 Sen. The progress of your ideas in regard to incum- 
 brances is reluctantly onward. Even after having built chi- 
 merical hopes on drawers your state-room will put at your dis- 
 
 * We must respectfully suggest to Mr. T. that pith is contained in the 
 Elder-tree, and not in the Alder or Birch though the Birch is often capable 
 of pithy application to any particular subject in hand, as Ned had, no 
 doubt, learned in the school of experienceor the experience of school
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 61 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress. Boxing the clothes and closing the box. 
 
 posal, the list of indispensables is scarcely diminished. You 
 finish by classing the major part of your effects in an enormous 
 box if you are so unfortunate as to have one. If you have 
 none, you leave half your trash behind, and are as much bet- 
 ter off, as " Christian" is, when he starts to go up the " Hill 
 Difficulty," when Bunyan makes his bundle drop off. 
 
 Ned Tes. A modern pedestrian would rather keep the 
 bundle and make the bunnions drop off. 
 
 Sen. When, by the help of " the cook and all hands" and 
 knees, you shut the blessed chest, you have still a sinister 
 
 THE CLOSING SCENE.
 
 62 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Obliging friends, 1. e., friends who oblige you to accommodate them. 
 
 after-thought left by your victory. How would you have 
 done in a continental inn, left to your own resources? 
 
 Tes. Now, let me suggest. Suppose a friend comes in, to 
 your confusion, and inquires if it would be too much to 
 ask you to take charge of a parcel for him very light. 
 You see no parcel, and therefore conclude it is in his pocket, 
 and hold out your hand for it, with every protestation of 
 pleasure. " Very light," he adds, " but a little voluminous." 
 But since you are so very kind, he calls in his man with an 
 enormous bandbox large enough for three hats and feathers ! 
 " It's only some Paris fashions that my wife does not like, and 
 would be extremely obliged if you would carry back to- Rue 
 Quelquechose, and get 157 francs. She is sure you will have 
 but little trouble, as the people were very polite, and, at any 
 rate, they distinctly promised to take them back." There is 
 a pleasant vista opening before you ! A fine opening for a 
 rising young man to make himself generally useful, and no 
 salary given ! A wild-goose chase 
 
 Ned Tes. For a goose with ostrich feathers she does not 
 like. A chase where you make game of yourself for the sport 
 of the spectators. 
 
 Sen. There is nothing to do in such cases but " grin and 
 bear it," as I know by the sad experience of a bachelor the 
 public servant, "because he's got no family to take care of." 
 
 Tes. You literally grin and bear it turn to your mem- 
 orandum-book, commonplace-book, or what not feigning a 
 polite contentment 
 
 Ned Tes. Feigning outwardly, but profaning inwardly 
 putting on a grin to conceal cAcrgrin. 
 
 Tes. You turn to your book to take down his directions, 
 or rather, turn to look for it. It is lost, as a matter of course. 
 When, at last, your assistant begins to have a dim idea that
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 63 
 
 A memorandum-book " Though lost to sight, to memory dear." 
 
 you are looking for the little green book with the string 
 round -it, "O, it's safe," he says, "in the big chest, at the 
 very bottom !" 
 
 Sen. Ha, ha, ha ! 
 
 Tes. Your little book your only hope and dependence ! 
 With " mems" to be used before you set out, and every day 
 from that till the one you get home again ! 
 
 There is a certain bland and placid expression that 
 despair can give as well as content, and that is the look you 
 give the big chest to be opened and unpacked again ! 
 
 Sen. Now suppose that, after taking out every article 
 without producing the book, you spy it behind the tvunk, 
 where it has lain all the time: how infinitely it adds to your 
 rage to find that your pains have been bootless ! 
 
 Ned Tes. 1 should be tempted to try whether my boots 
 would be painless, applied to the carcass of the fellow that 
 made me the trouble and the assistant to boot. 
 
 Sen. The only redeeming feature about these preliminary 
 annoyances is, that if they accomplish the end you fear, they 
 do you a positive benefit. When you drive tearing down to 
 the dock, and see the steamer gliding complacently down the 
 stream, out of your reach, you are positively better off than 
 if you had got off, by double the amount of the passage- 
 money you have paid and forfeited. Your disappointed, 
 balked feeling will not let you think so ; but we'll prove it, 
 unavoidably and incontestably prove it, before we mark off 
 half the catalogue of the " Miseries of Travelling." 
 
 Ned Tes. Still, it is not pleasant, when you wish to be 
 riyhl, ahead, to be left, behind. It's the contrary. 
 
 Sen. Being left behind before you set out, saved you from 
 a dozen or so of similar experiences before you would have 
 got back.
 
 64 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The poetical " bark," like Peruvian bark, nauseous enough in reality. 
 
 Tea. How sea-sick to-day is the man who sailed yesterday ! 
 
 Ned Tes. " His bark is on the sea." And he is " sick as 
 a dog," of course. Hydrophobia, too, or madness of water 
 disgust at water and every thing connected therewith. 
 
 Sen. " Mens insana in corpore insano." 
 
 Ned Tes. Construe that, " wretched souls in retching 
 bodies," and you furnish the faculty with very fair Latin for 
 sea-sickness. 
 
 Tes. But suppose we stop the mortar and start the bricks. 
 
 1. To enter a continental cathedral with the sole object of hearing the 
 music, and then to find that the price you have to pay is, attendance on a 
 mass of mummery from which you have no escape and which seems to 
 have no end. 
 
 Ned Tes. The Te Deum of the choir not sufficing to relieve 
 the tedium of the other exercises, 
 
 2. In London noticing a slight surprise or disposition to laugh, in the 
 company where you deliver your first letter of introduction, on casually 
 mentioning the locality you must seek to deliver your second. 
 
 3. To hear the H d quoted as authority, and then to hear your 
 
 indignant disclaimer civilly attributed to party hatred, "which runs so 
 high in America." 
 
 4. To be pestered with meeting, time after time, as you go through 
 England, a low-bred, drawling, spitting countryman and ship companion 
 of your own, who started at the same time, and to see about the same 
 things, and who, therefore, seems to be your fate. Wherever you go to 
 the top of St Paul's, he is there ; to the bottom of the lowest mine in 
 Wales, there he is, that indefatigable man ; until you ask him, in despera- 
 tion, all the places he is going to, in order that you may stay away. 
 
 Tes. Then, suppose he mistakes your question for a wish 
 for his company, and answers that he'll go whichever way 
 you want. Not petikler.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LJFE. 65 
 
 mortem, examination connected with the dead letter office. 
 
 6. To have your inadvertent use of "right away" for "directly" 
 noticed by an ignorant Cockney, who says, " We never do those kind of 
 thing in Hingland, you know," and who would not hesitate to ask you to 
 " iing up your at on an ook in the all" 
 
 6. Entering France with the idea that you have a fair practical knowl- 
 edge of French, and then finding your only difficulties to be, that you can- 
 not understand what anybody says, and that nobody can understand what 
 you say. 
 
 7. Finding that you had been addressing a charming Frenchwoman all 
 the evening by a word which had an absurd meaning in her language, but 
 which you mistook for her name. 
 
 8. To be eternally disappointed in receiving letters. 
 Sen. I can give you an aggravation of that. 
 
 9. After having, with all possible care, sent a letter on shore by the 
 pilot, giving full directions, as you had agreed with your friends, where to 
 address, Ac., to wait week after week without a line, and then, when you do 
 seize the welcome envelope and tear it open, to find it a notice from the 
 postmaster, that if you will send eightpence to prepay the letter signed 
 by your name, it shall be forwarded to its destination ! 
 
 Sen. That bloody pirate pilot I mean had kept the 
 whole halfcrown, instead of prepaying, as he promised ! * 
 
 Ned Tes. I should say that that pilot was a lineal descend- 
 ant from Pontius ! 
 
 Sen. Possibly. But if Pontius Pilate washed his hands, 
 the habit certainly did not run in the family, according to 
 my observation. 
 
 Tes. As for railroads, they deserve an encyclopedia of 
 miseries for themselves. 
 
 A personal reminiscence of the Am. Ed.
 
 66 THE MISERIES OP HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Railroads, beginning with a depot-sition on the nuisance of starting. 
 
 Sen, So they do. The Anti-renters very properly con- 
 sider riding on a rail the proper accompaniment of tarring 
 and feathering; and I shrewdly suspect the analogy holds 
 good that riding on two rails is just twice as uncomfortable. 
 
 Tes. I'll start, if you like. But don't suppose that I'm 
 going abroad for railway miseries. We may as well begin 
 with the R. R. For starting, that offers unparal- 
 leled attractions. After you get fairly on the rails, it is 
 only inevitably uncomfortable, but the outset is unneces- 
 sarily so. 
 
 Ned Tes. The corporations probably, (as an exception to 
 the general rule,) have a soul, and their sole object is to save 
 any one from unnecessary rail-ing. 
 
 10. On getting out of your carriage in a pouring rain 
 
 Ned Tes. (Poor plan to set out when the rains set in.) 
 
 there being no shelter to drive under to contest the hackman's charge, you 
 are cheated as a matter of course. 
 
 To find, on rushing at the little, unprotected door, through a me!6e of 
 express wagons, orange-women, tall hotel stages, <feo, that two solid feet, 
 human, occupy every superficial foot of floor in the little, whitewashed, 
 tobacco-smeared sentry-box that serves for ticket-office, baggage-room 
 and passenger-room ; leaving you the alternative of standing on the toes 
 of one of the said feet (human) or on your dignity outside in the rain, 
 while you watch quitting the other shore the boat supposed, by courtesy, 
 to be on hand to meet you. And this road averages tibirty-six trains a 
 day over part of its rails ! * 
 
 11. On the R. R. On arriving at the one hundred and 
 
 third stopping-place, with one house in it and one road leading to it, and 
 one passenger and one bundle of onions waiting on the platform : to ask 
 
 * A new depot is since built
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. C7 
 
 The wliistlo :i car-tune preliminary to a picture of despair. 
 
 the conductor, confidentially, how many more there are of the same sort 
 before you will reach your destination and to be told, confidentially, that 
 he does not know. 
 
 12. To get on an overloaded train, and see envyingly various 
 
 pedestrians walking by you on the other track, remarking with a bland 
 MI tile, that they would stop and join you but that they are in a great 
 hurry. 
 
 1 8. On the R. R. Before setting out, to have your friends, with 
 
 meaning looks, take an affectionate farewell of you, and then to sit by a 
 niiin who details to you the particulars of all the accidents as you pass the 
 scene of each. 
 
 14. A car window that will not be put up when it is down, nor down 
 when it is up. % 
 
 16. Attempting to pencil memoranda at high speed, with a single 
 piece of paper placed in the palm of your left hand. 
 
 16. Riding in a close car, to raise incautiously the streaming window, 
 and feel a great cinder dash into your eye (subito oculis objicitur mon- 
 strum) then, after carrying it home in an agony and sitting for an hour 
 while the socket is rummaged with the corner of a handkerchief your eye 
 left sorer than ever ; the metal appearing to have grown into a mine since 
 it first dug its pit there. 
 
 17. While standing on a platform, to be startled by a proposal of the 
 conductor to " put you out," and to find that he only meant, jocosely, to 
 put out a cinder which had burnt a hole in your great-coat, about as large 
 as a dollar bill. 
 
 18. Standing up at a " R. R. Restaurant" to get a dinner (!) and as 
 soon as you have got something -better than you expected, and paid for it, 
 to be called away by the accursed " HOOT ! HOOT !" of the locomotive, and 
 " all aboard" from the conductor. It is a slight enhancement to find, when 
 you havo got into your seat, that it was the signal of a train going the 
 other way, and that you would have had plenty of time a decided 
 enhancement to find, when you had supposed it was the other train, that 
 it was yours, now fast quickening its pants in the distance.
 
 68 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Inn for It with a vengeance. 
 
 Ned Tes. I think I should quicken my pants, and trot 
 after it. 
 
 19. To be made the victim of one of those new and splendid combi- 
 nations by which they give you a check to the end of your journey, and 
 take charge of your baggage, and you don't see it again till you arrive at 
 your destination if then. 
 
 Ned Tes. In other words, they check your trunks to the 
 end of the route, but do not check them when they get there, 
 so they go on indefinitely. 
 
 20. To spend your time and money to get back your wardrobe 
 
 Ned Tes. Instituting one suit for the recovery of many 
 
 To recover damages and buy a new outfit ; and then to have the 
 
 company find your trunk, and take back their money. 
 
 21. To have your friends, instead of condoh'ng with you on this loss, 
 or any other, all ask with one voice, why you didn't do this and why you 
 didn't do that, and why you didn't do the other ! 
 
 22. In the room of a country tavern, to which you are condemned by 
 floods, or indisposition, or something inevitable, to find yourself reduced 
 to the following delasxeinens de cceur. First, for the morning : Iving on 
 the old rectangular horse-hair sofa, without cushions, and with every place 
 where a head could possibly be laid, worn ragged, and frayed out, so that 
 each particular horse-hair appears emulous of adding to your scanty locks 
 by firmly implanting itself in your baldest and tenderest spot Trying, in 
 this agreeable situation, to squeeze out something more from the only 
 paper you could get, to while away a ten hours' car-ride the day before. 
 Then turning to your surroundings for consolation the whitewash peeling 
 off the ceiling (hang the rhymes), and the blue and yellow paper fly-trap 
 hung in the middle, which appears to have done its duty most punctil- 
 iously by the innumerable points and exclamation marks on it Thou for 
 the twentieth time you look at the wretched prints and ornaments hung 
 round the room female personifications of the four seasons, or " Maria,"
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A stir-up to the placidity of your temper, already saddley tried. 
 
 " Jane," or " Ellen," <fcc., daubed over any how with red, purple, or rasp- 
 berry cream colors : or " The Lovers' Parting," and " The Lover's Return," 
 in each of which a sailor, with head and pantaloon legs of the largest size, 
 (the latter an immense distance apart,) is seen within four steps of his 
 boat's crew, unceremoniously embracing a young lady, whose dress 
 matches so exactly with his hat as to appear to be off the same piece : and 
 a copy of the Declaration of Independence, with portraits of the Presidents 
 down to the last but four. After getting all this by heart, you ask, in 
 desperation, for some books, which, when brought, turn out to be " Village 
 Hymns ;" three or four wrecks of different spelling-books ; half a magazine 
 in which every piece is "to be continued ;" an abridged abridgment of the 
 History of the United States in questions and answers, with half the 
 leaves torn out, and the other half illegible from thumbing ; an old edition 
 of American Railway Statistics ; Ac., <fec. ; in each of which you try a few 
 pages, nod over them till nine o'clock at night, and then retire to bed 
 in a blue cloud of disgust, to hear the rain beat on the shingles till near 
 twelve, before sleep blesses your weary mind and nervous and uuweary 
 body. 
 
 Tes. " O horror, horror, horror, horror, horror !" I can 
 never hope to go beyond this ; and yet the following would 
 have made no bad figure, had it stood by itself: 
 
 23. In a summer excursion with a delightful party, having one " black 
 sheep" in your flock, who, though he obtruded himself on the company, 
 neither enjoys fine scenery, joins in your gayety, can put up with incon- 
 veniences on the road, nor will take himself off 
 
 24. The flap of a limber saddle rolling up, and galling and pinching 
 your calf just above the boot, during a long day's ride over Michigan 
 roads. 
 
 25. A very high, hard trotting horse, who sets off before you have 
 discovered that the stirrups are too long to assist you in humoring his 
 gait : then trying in vain to stop him. 
 
 26. At the moment when your horse is beginning to run away with 
 you ; losing your stirrup, which bangs your instep raw as often as you 
 attempt to catch it with your foot
 
 70 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Drivers. The only stage-managers who don't get disgusted with the dram(a). 
 
 27. Or ; being mounted on a beast who, as soon as you have watered 
 him in the road, very coolly proceeds to repose himself in the pond 
 without taking you at all into his counsel, or paying the slightest attention 
 to your vivid remonstrances on the subject ; and then, after he has taken 
 his roll, getting on the wet saddle in cold blood. A horse that balks 
 when he is whipped. 
 
 28. Or; riding out to dinner, many miles off, on a beast that will not 
 quit his walk, while you know that nothing short of a gallop will save 
 your time ; no spurs, and nothing in your hand but a weak stick, which 
 you presently reduce to a flail, and this you are constrained to use more 
 gently than ever, for fear of reducing it to a stump, though the animal 
 would take more whipping than ever, if you had it to <nve. 
 
 29. Starting for an open ride to an evening engagement, in a mist 
 which successively becomes a mizzle, a drizzle, a shower, a rain, a torrent 
 On arriving at the house at last, you have to beg the favor of making 
 yourself look like a full sack (or an empty one) by wearing your host's 
 intractable clothes. 
 
 30. On your return from an excursion to the lakes, <fec., being asked 
 
 by the first friend you meet, how you were struck with , naming 
 
 the most celebrated spot on the tour ; the one, however, which by some 
 villainous mischance you did not see. 
 
 31. On "Western roads again. The attempt you make to sleep in a 
 stage wagon under the following lulling circumstances. Resting your 
 head, with a new hat on it, against a side-post, from which it is incessantly 
 cuffed and bumped away by the jumps and jolts of the springless, shack- 
 ling machine ; your knees miserably cramped ; your opposite neighbor 
 continually bobbing forward in his sleep and in your stomach being 
 waked from any momentary doze by the rascally driver stopping at every 
 tavern to make himself drunker and drunker : then just as you are at last 
 sinking into something very like a nap, you are waked up by the day- 
 break to find that you are just taking leave of a beautiful country, through 
 which you have been stealing all night ; and entering on a dull, barren 
 flat, wliich continues through the day, as it had done through the day 
 before.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 71 
 
 The pest the dam-pest of damp sheets. 
 
 Sen. Your far-west journey gives us a host of good old 
 standard miseries that one might have travelled a lifetime on 
 the new-fangled plans without ever dreaming of. 
 
 Tea. Not because there is not as plentiful a supply now 
 as ever, but because there are so many new ones, that no one 
 head can contain them all in addition to the old. 
 
 Sen. Steamboats are my particular and especial bane. 
 Consequently it seems as if there never was any land between 
 me and the place I want to go to. There is a large assort- 
 ment of sore discomforts fresh and green (gangrene) in my 
 memory. For instance : 
 
 32. Enjoying 
 
 "A wet sheet" 
 without any 
 
 " flowing sea," 
 
 or any thing else in the least romantic. Rheumatic is a better word for 
 the feeling, as if, when you have laid yourself into your little flat shelf, 
 you had got between two newspapers fresh from the press, or were half 
 trying the water cure, viz., taking the wet sheet without any blanket pack 
 outside of it 
 
 33. After having been kept awake most of the trip by this and other 
 discomforts, to be waked out of your only nap by the steward's bell and 
 a raging headache, to hold a colloquy somewhat like the following with 
 your conscience and sense of duty : 
 
 " Mane, piger, stertis : Surge I inquit ; eja 
 Surge ! Negas. Instat : surge ! Inquit : non queo : 
 surge r* PERS. 
 
 * You, snoring, dream till noon : " Up ! up !" he cries : 
 No, no. " Yes ! yes ! get up 1" I can't " Rise 1 rise 1"
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 " I love a softer climb" than the upper berth, " Gents' Cabin." 
 
 Tes. That's misery enough of itself, heaven knows ; but 
 here is something in addition. 
 
 84. After rushing ashore in a most uncomfortable hurry cravat and 
 coat over your arm, drawer-strings hanging out, and collar lost to fiud, 
 as the boat disappears, that you have stopped at the wrong place that 
 two landings farther on is where your friends are waiting for you. 
 
 35. To climb into an upper berth during a long moonlight-night trip 
 on the Hudson ; knowing that, sleepy as you are, you may look forward 
 to listening to the boots of that crazy race who look at views, withiu an 
 inch and three quarters of the end of your nose for the rest of the night 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " He thought as he hollowed his narrow bed, 
 
 And punched up his meagre pillow, 
 How the foe and the stranger should tread o'er his head, 
 As lie sped on his way o'er the billow." WOLFE (altered). 
 
 36. To go to Albany by steamboat Or rather, to start for Albany, 
 which, heaven knows, is a very different thing in these days ; and it's all 
 you can calculate on. 
 
 37. To find that you have mistaken, end for end of the diagram in 
 selecting your berth, and instead of getting the hindmost, you have secured, 
 with great pains, the state-room between the cylinders and the wheel 
 Your good-humor and self-gratulation are vastly enhanced if it happens to 
 be an ice night the first trip breaking up in the spring during the 
 whole of which, each particular float keeps up one uncompromising roar ! 
 
 Tes. Mrs. T. and myself once occupied a room under 
 some such circumstances, when a cake of ice came bodily 
 through the thin partition, and rested against the lower berth ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Then, no doubt, mother treated the passengers 
 to an ice cream, (or an ice scream, or a nice scream.) 
 
 Sen. I wish you could learn to confine your puns to the
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 73 
 
 Transpositions, a new epidemic. Inoculation for the reader. 
 
 dead languages, Ned. However, bad puns deserve a con- 
 spicuous place among the miseries of life, so you are always 
 adding to our common stock. 
 
 Tes. Do you know, Sensitive, these wretched transposi- 
 tions, that just now infest the land like the frogs in Egypt, 
 threaten to become a permanent plague, compared to which 
 puns were as Christmas presents for rarity and agreeableness. 
 A rod (of correction) that will swallow up puns, as Aaron's 
 rod swallowed the Sorcerers'. 
 
 Ned Tes. Which put him at least a rod ahead of his 
 competitors. 
 
 Sen. Think of a man blandly looking in your face, and 
 asking you to vote the " Tig Whicket," or take " a scottle of 
 Botch Ale!" 
 
 Tes. Even my next-liut-one-to-youngest has learned to say 
 he's " feak and weeble," as an excuse for laziness when he 
 wants me to carry him. 
 
 Sen. Even that is not the worst of it. If people want to 
 make such besotted fools of themselves, why let them. But 
 the plague is infectious. I caught myself making one as I 
 polished my hat the other day preparatory to going out. 
 Said I, "Why should every housekeeping outfit contain a 
 hat-brush ?" Because, by merely turning it round, you can 
 make a brat hush ! 
 
 " Is it a dream t or am I still a child ?" 
 
 a drivelling infant in arms a babe at the breast! 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ! ! 
 
 Tes. (disdainfully.) It's base flattery to call such things 
 childish ! 
 
 Sen. Talking of children brings us back to the lesson for 
 the day, travelling miseries ; through association with one of the 
 
 4
 
 74 THE MISERIES OF' HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Mean imposition not In position to be resented. 
 
 numerous annoyances of omnibus riding numerous in pro- 
 portion to the number of their inevitable sufferers ; contrary 
 to the invariable rule of the good things of this life, which are 
 plentiful in inverse proportion to the number of their par- 
 takers. 
 
 38. Sitting in an omnibus next to a maudlin mother, with a sick, but 
 not silent, infant windows all as tight as wax for the poor child's sake ! 
 
 Tes. " Quodcunque ostendis mihi sick (O that I could add 
 incredulous /) odi."* 
 
 39. To drop your gold dollar exactly in the middle of the charmed 
 circle of straw that your vis-a-vis has been playing the American tune\ 
 on to your great disgust during your ride. 
 
 40. To see a lady enter the stage with two children, take seats near 
 the door, and make no motion to vacate either of the three places while 
 the stage fills up ; and then, near the end of the route, ask you to hand up 
 sixpence to the driver, while she hastily gets out 1 
 
 Tes. I assure you the most unmitigated mental misery in 
 all my experience is the uncomfortable, effectless anger 
 excited by witnessing little selfish impositions practiced on. 
 others, for which reason, if for no other, I have no right to 
 interfere, and nothing to do but smother the spontaneous 
 tendency to exclaim against them. 
 
 Sen. For instance, to see, as we three did, the other even- 
 ing, on arriving late at a party, two or three specimens of 
 Young America, snickering, empty into their own pockets 
 
 * " Quodcunqne ostendis mihi sic incredulus odi." HOB. 
 
 That which you thus make known to me, disbelieving, I hate, 
 j- A spit-toon.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 75 
 
 f.''://i> IB the smoker's care if he only has a cigar 1 
 
 the djfar-case provided in the dressing-room for the departing 
 
 Tes. That reminds me of a most enraging predicament to 
 ;i smoker in the country, without a waking man, woman, or 
 child, for miles around. 
 
 41. Setting out for a long night walk, in which the prospect of two 
 good cigars is the only friendly element, (the other elements having all 
 conspired against you,) you find with pleasure one match left. After every 
 precaution you scrape it It does not take. You strike again, harder. It 
 cracks down by the end. Once more you take hold of the very tip and 
 scrape long and well. It lights, and you cautiously remove your fingers 
 to the upper part, and the burning speck drops off in the wet grass, and 
 looks up for a moment 
 
 " Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue," 
 
 and then you see nothing but the green spot gathered in your eyes by 
 looking at it so intently ! 
 
 A MATCH FOR ANYTHING. (Anything for a match.)
 
 76 THE MISERIES Of HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A feet-Id blast What boots it to complain ? 
 
 Sen. Hard enough. We find it difficult to stick to the 
 road when there are so many gardens of passion-flowers on. 
 every side. Let us finish up our travelling miseries after this 
 one which belongs to the little selfishnesses we were speak- 
 ing of. 
 
 42. To have a lady, -whose company you are in, complain to the shop- 
 owner of a clerk in a case where he is right and she is wrong. 
 
 Tes. A trying dilemma, certainly. Now for the omni- 
 buses once more. They cannot be exhausted yet. 
 
 43. To take the seat by an end window, and be regaled with a fresh 
 breeze, tinctured with the boots of a stable friend of the driver's, seated on 
 the top with his feet hanging over. 
 
 44. After rushing forward, on account of the great haste you are in, 
 past one stage to catch the one ahead of it, to see the last become first and 
 the first last ; the other omnibus passing you, while your rascally driver 
 waits for a load, answering all your remonstrances with as many ruses, to 
 make you think he is going on : pulling up suddenly, as if called by a pas- 
 senger in the distance, and standing as long as he dares for fear of your 
 finding out that his passenger is a myth a creature of his imagination ; 
 then, just as you are going to get out, he swings open the door to let the 
 myth get in. Nobody comes, and he slowly pulls the strap and goes on, 
 to show you how exceedingly slow an omnibus horse can trot Soon, 
 however, you hear indications that he is going to pull up again. 
 
 Ned Tes. Which only bring new conviction to your ears 
 that " Wo" is the lot of wayfarers hi this world. 
 
 45. This time, however, you think you know a trick worth two of 
 that, and begin a storm by telling him so, among other things ; interrupted 
 by the entrance of a real passenger, an elegant lady acquaintance, who 
 must have heard the whole of your tirade. 
 
 46. Calling loudly, " Your stage is full, driver !" with a dignified look 
 at the intruder, and then finding that there are but five on your side.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 77 
 
 " Pleasure row ed a fairy-boat." What rode a ferry-boat ? 
 
 47. For a stranger in the city : to get carefully into the right line of 
 stages, nnd not find out that it is one going the wrong way, till on reach- 
 ing Forty -second street he asks innocently, " Is this the South Ferry T 
 
 Sen. One more, and then " Omnibus finis venit."* 
 
 48. A long ride on a hot day, when the only indication of a breeze ia 
 a little puff of dust in your face now and then. 
 
 Ned Tes. Perhaps there is no wind : but " de gust-ibus non 
 est disputandum." 
 
 60. To be detained by the ferry-boat's running aground or getting into 
 tribulation of some sort, within twenty feet of the dock, there to wait till 
 the tide rises. 
 
 Ned Tes. Tied up in one sense, waiting for tide up in an- 
 other. 
 
 61. While congratulating yourself on having caught the last boat going 
 over, to fall asleep, and stay so til^the boat has started to go back. 
 
 Ned Tes. Unlike Charon's ferry-boat, which never by any 
 mistake brings you back, and to whom Styx in the mud can 
 be no impediment 
 
 Sen. That is a full-grown misery in itself; with the pros- 
 pect before you of staying in the dark, dusty ferry-room all 
 night, till the woman comes to clean it out in the morning ; 
 or, at best, of going to a miserable wharf-hotel for a lodging : 
 and the retrospect of such ineffable stupidity as the cause of 
 your dilemma. Now, suppose that the boat is unfortunately 
 just at that distance as to leave you in doubt as to whether 
 it was a space for jumping, but no doubt as to whether there 
 was space for deliberation. You jump IN, (water 31 de- 
 
 * To all things comes an end.
 
 78 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Cattle damages. The joint-stock having to pay for the disjointed. 
 
 grees, as near as may be,) and are fished out, half insensible, 
 with a ruined watch and suit of clothes, and without a hat, 
 ruined or otherwise. 
 
 Tes. Well, I'm glad our business is only to give the pains 
 of each description of travelling, and not to decide which may 
 claim the most. 
 
 Sen. I stick to the steamboat. 
 
 Tes. As for me, I would go in for the regular, unpunctual, 
 hot, cold, dusty, rainy, unromantic, unsafe Rail Road. 
 
 Ned Tes. It's lucky the corporations can take a little 
 railing without taking offence. 
 
 Sen. If they would take a fence and keep the cattle off 
 the track, it would save the companies some money, and the 
 public some lives, and would be no more than right besides, 
 on the beasts' account. It is bad enough to take away their 
 occupation, without subjecting them to the disagreeable sur- 
 prise of finding themselves cut in two, before they begin to 
 suspect that any thing is the matter. 
 
 Ned Tes. Out of one window of an express train, the head 
 and forequarters of a cow may often be seen grazing ; while, 
 from the opposite one, is visible the tail brushing the flies off 
 the odd half ! However, we have always one motive for 
 using the railway. 
 
 Tes. What is that, my son ? 
 
 Ned Tes. A locomotive. 
 
 Tes. Pshaw ! (To Sensitive.) This has been rather a long 
 and laborious trial, albeit we take evidence only for one side. 
 
 Sen. Yes, and we have not come near the end of our tether 
 yet. Not one word have we said about passports, nor cus- 
 tom-houses, nor banks, money matters, &c. 
 
 Tes. Well, let us dismiss them all with one general groan 
 for the whole tribe of officials, and let them continue to prac-
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 79 
 
 Official appointments. Miserable ftici-n elevated to responsible potx. 
 
 tice their annovances on other people, or, when all the world has 
 become wise enough to stay at home, on each other, like vipers 
 in a barrel, or the bores in Swedenborg's Retributory Paradise. 
 
 Sen. Most men, when they get " an appointment," seem 
 to forget that they are hired to do the work in their office, 
 and to imagine that they have hired the rest of the world to 
 do what little there is requiring attention outside of it ! 
 
 Tes. There they sit and mend their pens, and chat with 
 their friends and each other, while their employer, the public, 
 twirls its thumbs and repeats the multiplication table, to 
 pass away the time outside ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Where do those men expect to die when they 
 go to ? Their consciences will be oppressed with many 
 
 A GREAT WAIT.
 
 80 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The trials of social men. So shall men always suffer. 
 
 CHAPTER Y. 
 
 The trials of social men. So shall men always suffer. A fair exhibition of the neat 
 cattle of society. A hard row to hoe. Divisions made by raiflery. Schisms, not 
 witticisms. Music racks are well named : likewise, the drains of which they 
 are the instruments. Noisy pets, that might as well be trum-pets, or pet-ards, at 
 once. It's sometimes pleasant to be found " not at home" never, to be found 
 out. The country tempts you away from home, and the contretemps that follow 
 you. It is hard to have'to bring your guests sick smiles. The pains of politeness. 
 The " mould of form" that gathers on social intercourse. An unlucky speech that 
 doesn't admit of a-mealy-oration afterwards. Superlative flatterers, positive flats. 
 Som-nolence vs. bene-volence. A soar throat is just what a singer should have to 
 reach the high notes with. Building-sites and other exciting sights not heretofore 
 cited There's one pathy for all diseases, we all employ when we can get it. 
 Sympathy. A calf tied to a waggin' tongue, by a halt-er without a bitt of com- 
 punction. De vinculo matrimonii. A father, tendret to his offspring. 
 
 Tes. Robinson Crusoe, indeed! No, no Timon or Dio- 
 genes, if you will these are the recluses for me the privi- 
 lege of storming and railing is all I have purchased by making 
 my bow in drawing-rooms, and I won't part with it for a trifle. 
 
 Sen. 
 
 " The grief that does not speak, . 
 
 Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break." 
 
 Tes. Come, then, " give sorrow words. " 
 
 1. In attempting to take up the poker softly, (an invalid asleep in the 
 room,) throwing it violently down, sociably accompanied by the tongs and 
 shovel in its full. 
 
 2. Briskly stooping to pick up a lady's fan at the same moment when 
 two other gentlemen are doing the same, and so making a cannon with 
 your head against both of theirs and this without being the happy man, 
 after alL
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 81 
 
 A fair exhibition of the neat cattle of society. A hard row to Uoe. 
 
 3. A perpetual blister alias, a sociable next door neighbor, who lias 
 taken a violent affection for you, in return for your no less violent antipathy 
 to him. 
 
 Tea. To her, if you please I am sure that odious Mrs. 
 M'Call will fairly worry me out of my life, if she stays in 
 our neighborhood three months longer. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Vse miserse nimium vicina I" VIRO. 
 
 4. A fellow who, after having obliquely applied to you for instruction 
 upon any subject, keeps showing a restless anxiety t5 seem already fully 
 informed upon it ; perpetually interrupting your answer with " Yes, sir 
 yes, yea, I know ; true, I am perfectly aware of that 0, of course !" <fcc. 
 
 5. Visiting a remarkably nice lady, who lets you discover, by the ill 
 suppressed convulsion of her features and motions, that she considers your 
 shoes as not sufficiently wiped, (in your passage over at least twenty 
 mats,) that you stand too near to a darling jar, lean rather too emphatically 
 against the back of your chair, <fec., <to, till you begin to envy the situation 
 of real prisoners, 
 
 6. Tearing your throat to rags in abortive efforts to call back a person 
 who has just left you, and with whom you have forgotten to touch on one 
 of the most important subjects which you met to discuss. 
 
 7. AJter having been accidentally detained on a water excursion far 
 beyond tie time you have to spare, rowing homeward, against wind and 
 tide, with an appointment of the utmost consequence before you, which, 
 you know, will soon be behind you. Then, in plucking out your watch 
 to see how much too late you shall be, jerking it over the side of the boat, 
 and seeing it founder in an instant. 
 
 8. Suddenly thinking of your best argument in a debate at dinner, 
 and, in your eagerness to state it, swallowing your wine the wrong way, 
 and so squeaking and croaking more and more unintelligibly, with the 
 toars running down your cheeks, till the conversation has been turned, or 
 your antagonist has left the company : 
 
 4*
 
 82 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Divisions made by raillery. Schisms, not witticisms. 
 
 -" in mediis conatibus, segri 
 
 Succidimus ; non lingua valet, non corpore note 
 Sufficiuut vires nee vox, nee verba sequuutur."* VIRG. 
 
 9. After having left a company where you have been galled by the 
 raillery of some wag by profession some fellow of more bitterness than 
 brains 
 
 Ned Tes. A wag of many tales, with a sting to each 
 
 To think, at your leisure, of a repartee, which, if discharged at the 
 proper moment, would have blown bun to atoms. 
 
 
 10. Losing your way in an argument, so as to be obliged suddenly to 
 hold your tongue, though, an instant before, you had the whole series of 
 your reasonings full in view, and, could you have brought them to bear 
 upon your opponent at the proper moment, he must have been struck dead- 
 
 11. Accompanying a fond father in his attendance at his daughter's 
 " dancing day," at a petty boarding-school 
 
 1 2. After relating an excellent story, or pointed witticism, to a strange 
 company the frosty silence, vacant stare, with which it is received by the 
 different auditors, of whose stupidity you had not been aware. 
 
 Tes. Yes, yes, I have been there too you might as well 
 crack jokes in a dormitory at the dead of night, as in certain 
 parties " Joco uti illo, quidem, licet sed sicut in somno et 
 quietibus caeteris." 
 
 Sen. By the way : praiseworthy children, in general, are a 
 frightful bore. I boarded in a house once where there was a 
 little girl, who was a marvel of perseverance. As to music, 
 
 * We, 'midst our strugglings, fainting powerless, 
 Fail not the tongue can do its wouted task, 
 Nor in our frames the well-known functions serve, 
 Nor voice, nor will articulation come.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 83 
 
 Music racks are well named : likewise, the strain* of which they are the instruments. 
 
 she did not play she worked. Huw she did strive and wres- 
 tle with that piano! It was a good deal the biggest, but it 
 gave in, at last, and did not resist any more, but only com- 
 plained. / gave in, too. I came pretty near going " right 
 off the handle," to be numbered among the killed and 
 wounded of the " Battle of Prague," (or its modern succes- 
 sor ;) but I escaped saved myself by running away at 
 
 THE ELEVENTH HOUR. 
 
 Tes. You do that girl injustice. Hers was the spirit 
 would have made a hero succeed. 
 
 Ned Tes. And a hearer succumb. 
 
 Sen. That's very true, as far as the girl is concerned. 
 Poor little heavy-headed, light-bodied, bright-eyed, dark- 
 cheeked thing ! She did not live long. Unnatural education 
 made her what she ought not to have been, and killed her 
 when she ought not to have died. If I had been coroner, I 
 would have given a verdict "Died of injudicious friends."
 
 84 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Noisy pete, that might as well be truin-pets, or pet-ards, at once. 
 
 1 3. Coming in too late for a breakfast engagement, and being contem- 
 plated in silence by the rest of the company, who have done, but who 
 think it polite to remain seated round the table, while you hastily wash 
 down your glazed toast and butter, with drawn, vapid, cold tea which, 
 bad as it is, you prefer to the operose process of a fresh preparation for you. 
 
 Ned Tes. Call me what you please, but don't call me 
 late to meals. 
 
 14. Invading an humble regular family, (while quietly assembled 
 round the dinner-table,) upon the wrong day. On entering the room you 
 catch the servant in the act of removing the cloth now to be re-laid, and 
 slowly spread with the lukewarm ruins of the late meal, tumultuously re- 
 manded from the kitchen, half rescued as it is from the clutches of the 
 powers below ; and alternately seasoned, as you proceed, with stigmas 
 upon every fork-full you take up, and panegyrics upon the delightful party 
 with whom you were anxiously expected to partake it on the day before. 
 
 15. Balking a good gape, by forcing your lips close together, in order 
 to keep it a secret from a bore, that you are yawning in your sleeve at his 
 stupidity. Likewise : paying a long visit at the retired house of a well- 
 meaning soul, whose only idea of entertaining you, is that of never leaving 
 you a moment by yourself 
 
 16. Seeing a swaggering smatterer in knowledge encircled by his 
 levee of listeners, who blindly recognize his claim to be considered as an 
 oracle; perpetually and bowingly consulting him, and then patiently 
 swallowing the response, like a bolus, without venturing to analyze it 
 
 17. Being caught in the fact of ogling your charmer, by the person 
 from whom you are most desirous of concealing your tender anguish. 
 
 18. On making a morning call at the house of a retired old lady, all 
 your conversation wholly giving way to that of the dumb creatures who 
 compose her parlor menagerie parrots, macaws, cats, puppies, squirrels, 
 monkeys, <fec., Ac. which open upon you altogether at the moment of 
 your entrance, and never cease till that of your departure :
 
 THE MISERIES OF HITMAN LIFE. 85 
 
 It's sometimes pleasant to be found " not at home" never, to be found out. 
 
 " At once, an universal hubbub wild 
 Of stunning sounds, and voices all confus'd, 
 With loudest vehemence assaults his ear 
 And tumult, and confusion, all embroil'd, 
 And Discord, with a thousand various mouths !" 
 
 The good old Dowager seeming rather pleased with, so far from once 
 attempting to silence, this horrible " strife of tongues." 
 
 19. Finding that your sagacious servant has cautiously denied you to 
 the only person whom you ordered him to admit, and who has gone away 
 without leaving his address ; or, that he has as carefully produced you to 
 the single person whom you had sworn him to exclude OB BOTH I 
 
 20. Keeping an old engagement with foggy folks, when strongly 
 solicited to join a party of bright ones. Item, receiving an invitation of 
 the latter kind on the day after the party has taken place. 
 
 21. Immediately after expressing to a person your sorrow at having 
 been from home when he Lately called upon you incautiously letting out 
 some circumstance which completely disproves your alibi. 
 
 Ned Tes. Too bad, indeed ! a man is never at a worse 
 non plus than when, like poor Darius, 
 
 " exposed he lies" 
 Sen. Yes, and you may proceed 
 
 " without a friend to close his eyes 1" 
 its he looks the man who has detected him, in the face. 
 
 22. The hour before dinner, during which you sit in a solemn circle of 
 strangers : 
 
 " Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia torrent !"* VIBO. 
 
 * Horror, e'en silence' self appalls their souls !
 
 86 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The country tempts you away from home, and the contretemps that follow you. 
 
 Tes. Yes; and this when 
 
 23. During that hour, you are waiting for one who, on his entrance, 
 shows you the face of another stranger, instead of that of your particular 
 friend, who has been invited to meet you, but sends an excuse. 
 
 24. Endeavoring in vain to hear a person's remark, or question, 
 addressed to you ; and after repeatedly saying " I beg your pardon, sir," 
 <fca, and making him gd over it again, still not hearing him 
 
 "Neqttfequam ingeminans, iterumque vocavit."* 
 
 and so being reduced either to look foolish, and remain quite silent, or, in 
 your anxiety to seem to have heard him. answering altogether d tort et d 
 trovers. 
 
 25. The miscarriage of a letter announcing the day and hour of your 
 visit to a friend, so that, on your arrival on horseback, after a long journey, 
 (and this, too, from accidents on the road, late at night,) you find the 
 family all abed ; when, after an hour's bawling and knocking, you have 
 succeeded in bringing a servant to the window, and with great difficulty 
 convinced him that you are not a mad housebreaker, you are at length let 
 in, and on exploring the deserted rooms, in search of warmth and refresh- 
 ment, find no better entertainment than fires raked out, empty birder, 
 cellar locked up, no bed prepared, <fec., Ac. ; and to conclude, no stabling 
 for your horse, nor any public house in the place. 
 
 26. In conversation inadvertently touching the string which you 
 know will call forth the longest story of the flattest proser that ever 
 droned. 
 
 27. After sincerely and heartily agreeing, with one whose kindness you 
 much wish to conciliate, in some violent sentiment finding, from his 
 reply, that you have totally mistaken his meaning, and that he detests 
 your opinion, and you his ; so that, after a feeble attempt to extricate 
 yourself, you suddenly hold your tongue : 
 
 in vain repeating, 
 
 Again, and yet again he spake
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 87 
 
 It is hard to hare to bring your guest* tick #milt. 
 
 " Dixit et extemplo, (ncque enira responsa clubantur 
 Fida satis,) sensit medios delapsus in hostes : 
 Obetupuit retroque pedem, com voce represeif* VIEQ. 
 
 28. Living with, or even visitiug, one whose feelings widely differ from 
 your own with regard to the admission of fresh air. 
 
 Tes. Plain spoken enough, Sensitive : you know pretty 
 well that, upon this point, I am a mole, and you a chameleon ; 
 but I understand the hint, and so, as we have anxtraordiimry 
 call for breath just now, up goes the window. 
 
 Sen. Thank you, though I am certainly innocent of the 
 imputed insinuation. 
 
 29. After having, with much contrivance, effected an introduction 
 between two persons whom you considered as formed to take delight in 
 each other, discovering, before the first interview is half over, that they 
 are centrifugal with respect to each other. 
 
 SO. The abortive attempts which you occasionally make to seem in 
 high spirits when you are sick, stupid and wretched ; so that your mirth, 
 like Macbeth's Amen, " sticks in your throat ;" perceiving, moreover, that 
 the imposture is detected. 
 
 Or, what is almost as bad 
 
 31. In trying to laugh at the heavy joke of a good man, but a vile 
 jester, (" hilaris cum pondere virtus,") producing only that sort of spurious 
 chuckle, or laborious ha ! ha ! which you feel must betray you. even to the 
 worthy wag himself, though not at all of a suspicious nature ; then, on 
 being loudly asked by one of the company, " What is the joke ?" being 
 driven to confess that " you do not know" as, in truth, you do not ; 
 having laughed gratuitously, (without hearing or taking what was said,) 
 
 * He said and straight, from the reply unsure, 
 Felt him 'mid foes betray'd : amaz'd he stood, 
 And check'd his tongue, recoiling.
 
 88 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The pains of politeness. The "mould of form" that gathers on social intercourse. 
 
 merely to pleasure the old gentleman, whose smiling eye, thrown round 
 the table at the conclusion of his speech, had levied a general tax upon 
 the muscles of his friends. 
 
 Sen. But there is another compliment of the countenance, 
 which costs me more still. 
 
 32. The necessity sometimes imposed on you of wringing your fea- 
 tures into a smirk, in addressing a poltroon, who is a tiger at home, and a 
 lamb abroad : or any other miscreant out of prisoa 
 
 33. Talking with a man of iron, who hears only himself; and who, 
 after you have knocked all his arguments on the head, one after the other, 
 proceeds to haunt you with their ghosts ; so that destroying the substance 
 only brings upon you the additional trouble of laying the shadow. 
 
 34. Sitting on with a sepulchral party after supper, two or three 
 hours beyond the time at which you had ordered your carriage, but with 
 which your drunken coachman is unable to come ; so that you, at last, 
 walk home five or six miles in the rain. 
 
 35. In a large formal company, the necessity of communicating some- 
 thing which you are extremely desirous of keeping secret from the rest of 
 the party, to a person so very deaf that nothing under a roar will find its 
 way to him. Or, the dead silence which sometimes takes place in com- 
 pany, while you are availing yourself of the general noise of voices, to 
 enter upon confidential subjects with your next neighbor. 
 
 Tes. I can beat both your instances. 
 
 36. Being compelled by a deaf person in a large and silent company 
 to repeat some very washy remark three or four times over, at the highest 
 pitch of your voice. 
 
 37. The sensation of disgust, accompanied by a peculiar giddy faint- 
 ness, not to be described, and perhaps fully felt only by myself, which 
 affects one at certain speeches, certain manners, certain modes of pronun- 
 ciation, and certain samples of folly, in certain persons.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 89 
 
 An unlucky speech that doesn't admit of a-tnealy -oration afterwards. 
 
 38. Grating the sensibility, the prepossessions, the self-love, the vanity, 
 feo, of the person to whom you are speaking, by some unguarded words, 
 which, as soon as you have uttered them, you would die to eat ; then, 
 floundering and plunging deeper and deeper in your wild and confused 
 attempts to recover yourself. 
 
 39. Going from house to house, for the purpose of soliciting contribu- 
 tions for a case of distress ; and, with all your oratory, extorting nothing 
 more substantial than half-muttered good wishes for the success of your 
 charitable endeavors, though the good folks are " sorry they make a rule 
 never to give to any whom they do not know," fec. 
 
 40. After dinner, when the charming women with whom you were 
 sitting have withdrawn, being left exposed to a long tete-d-tete with a 
 Torpedo a fellow who will neither pump nor flow. 
 
 41. Being applied to, time after time, by certain easy folks with short 
 memories, for the loan of small sums, for the avowed purpose of making 
 purchases which you painfully refuse to yourself, out of economy ; or for 
 the still more provoking purpose of malting presents to their friends. 
 
 Ned Tes. They want to be let a loan and so do you. 
 
 42. After having said what you conceive to be a good thing, but which 
 you fear that none of the company heard, finding yourself reduced to the 
 horrible alternative of losing the credit of your wit, or of repeating your 
 bonmot, with the risk of its having been before heard, and disapproved ; 
 and, in this case, with the certainty of being thought both a fool and a 
 coxcomb. 
 
 43. When in a nervous and irritable mood sitting with one who has 
 an unceasing trick of swinging in his chair like a pendulum working his 
 foot up and down like a knife-grinder beating with his nails or knuckles 
 like a drummer, <fcc., <fec,, you being not suificiently intimate with your 
 tormentor to break in upon his occupations. 
 
 44. After loudly boasting of your superior skill in stirring the fire, 
 and being requested by the lady of the house to undertake it suddenly
 
 90 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Superlative flatterers, positive flats. Som-nolence v. bene-volenee. 
 
 extinguishing every spark, in playing off what you had announced as a 
 chef d'oeuvre of the poker. 
 
 45. Making your best bow for a supposed high compliment to yourself, 
 which, however, you are presently petrified by discovering was either not 
 intended at all, or intended for another. 
 
 46. Compelling yourself to take gulp after gulp of the ipecacuanha of 
 flattery, (known to be purely self-interested,) out of regard to the feelings 
 of some worthy friend or relation of the parasite, and whose presence re- 
 strains you from snubbing him. 
 
 47. Being crowed over in an argument by one whom politeness pre- 
 vents you from telling that you do not answer him, merely because, from 
 the thickness of his utterance, as well as of his head, you do not know what 
 he says or means. 
 
 48. Being baited on all sides with entreaties to sing, when, either by 
 nature or accident, you have no voice. 
 
 Tes. To which pray add, 
 
 49. Your feelings during and immediately after the performance of 
 another, who eminently possesses every ^qualification for a singer. 
 
 50. After a long pause in conversation with a reserved person, to 
 whom you are almost a stranger, re-addressing him at the same instant 
 when he is re-addressing you a polite and dead stop on both sides then, 
 after a reasonable time mutually given and taken for resuming the stifled 
 speech, without effect, both chancing, at the same point of time, to ven- 
 ture again, and both as suddenly again desisting ; till each is, at length, 
 necessitated to take refuge in silent confusion. 
 
 51. To be seized with morbid and irresistible sleepiness, while in con- 
 versation with persons who have every title to your respect or veneration, 
 and before whom 
 
 Ne " fas est obrepere somnum."* HOB. 
 
 * " Sleep may" not " be allowed to steal upon you."
 
 THK MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 91 
 
 A xiinr throat is just what a singer should hnve to reach tho high notes with. 
 
 62. Hearing bad grammar, bad emphasis, tc., from persons who ought 
 to know much better, without the liberty of interfering. 
 
 58. The comfort of being kept half an hour without your hat in a 
 drizzling rain, while attending a button holder to your gate. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside to the reader.) What is the difference be- 
 tween a bare head and a hair bed? A bare head flees for a 
 shelter ; a hair bed's a shelter for fleas. 
 
 64. On an afternoon visit in the country receiving a summons to 
 attend a few Cats, (who think themselves Kittens,) in their evening prom- 
 enade ; while the enchanting girl who formed your sole attraction to the 
 house is confined at home by a slight indisposition, which would have 
 only rendered her additionally interesting. 
 
 55. Being drawn into an inflammatory dispute while laboring under 
 a no less inflammatory sore throat 
 
 56. Drawing twelfth cake with a party who have too little fancy even 
 to attempt to support their characters ; or, if they do attempt it, to suc- 
 ceed : but who bespeak these, and other Christmas frolics, just as they had 
 bespoken the plumcake which attaches to them. 
 
 Ned Tes. Where each man, instead, makes a cake of him- 
 self, to the best of his ability. 
 
 57. Being destined to live with Automata people who regulate all 
 their thoughts, words, and actions, by the stop-watch whom no entreaties 
 can melt into a consent to rise before, or sit up after, a stated second to 
 bend to the most minute variation of the dinner hour to light a fire 
 before old Michaelmas day, or keep it in after Lady ditto to read, or 
 hear read, more, or less, than a measured number of pages at a sitting to 
 stay over the farce after a play, <fec., <fec. 
 
 Te*. 
 
 " Ilia manent immota locis, neque abordine cedunt"* VIEG. 
 * Fix'd they remain, nor from their order part
 
 92 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Building-sites and other exciting sights not heretofore cited. 
 
 68. At a diuner-table being placed at the bottom, while all the 
 choicest and liveliest people are thrown to the top you longing to be 
 among them, and to join their flights of fancy, instead of grinding along, 
 with your neighbors at the drowsy end of the table, in their broad- 
 wheeled wagons, on the milestone road of matter-of-fact 
 
 Tes. Not to be endured any more than another situation 
 not very unlike it. 
 
 59. Falling among a junto of lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or 
 naval captains, Ac., (all, except yourself, of one profession,) who instantly 
 and hotly begin to discuss the driest and most technical points relating to 
 their causes, cases, speculations, battles, Ac., (as the case may be,) without 
 granting you one merciful pause of hostilities during the whole evening : 
 rascals ! but the lawyers are the worst, when they set about it, because 
 they have the freest use of then- tongues : I have more than once fallen 
 into their clutches, and as often muttered between my teeth 
 
 " these are Counsellors, 
 
 That feelingly persuade what I am P 
 
 and that is, the most miserable dog alive, till I can get out of their com- 
 pany. 
 
 60. Sight-seeing for a day, with an enthusiastic showman ; or, being 
 showman for a day to an enthusiastic party of sight-seers. 
 
 61. While you are attentively Hstening to the information or opinions 
 of a well-stored man, being perpetually pestered by a popinjay at your 
 elbow, who claws you away from your nourishment, and forces you to 
 swallow hia froth. 
 
 62. Feeling called on, as host, to amuse a discontented old maid, who 
 " don't dance," (for a very good reason,) and being obliged to respond to 
 her acrid remarks on affectation in general, though without any open par- 
 ticular application to the girls enjoying themselves all around. 
 
 Ned Tes. I know who you mean, father. Miss Ann 
 Thropical, isn't she ? 
 Tes. Very.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 03 
 
 There's one puthy for all diseases, we all employ when we can get It Sympathy. 
 
 63. The sort of anxiety about all your motions and purposes, which ia 
 shown by certain persons, with whose insinuated interrogatories you have 
 to fence for a whole evening together. 
 
 Tes. Fence ! what, when you have not a cudgel, I sup- 
 pose ; that's my weapon upon such occasions. 
 
 64. Receiving the condolences of one whose manner and countenance 
 confess, against his orders, that his heart is in a broad grin. 
 
 65. Just as you have comfortably seated yourself with a party who 
 have met by long appointment, and who are all the favorites of each 
 other hearing the servant announce a person who is the favorite abomi- 
 nation of the whole set, yet who evidently shows, at his entrance, that he 
 has been plotting an agreeable surprise for you. 
 
 66. At breakfast hearing a good old lady detail, at full length, her 
 last night's long dull dream, affording nothing more remarkable than the 
 usual chaos of conclusions without premises, and that sort of topsyturvy, 
 tangled account of the flattest incidents of common life which we could all 
 give every morning, if we did not make all possible haste to forget the 
 nonsense as soon as we have recovered our senses ; but this is not all, for 
 as soon as she has, at length, brought her idiotic narrative to an end, and 
 you begin to breathe again, your attention is once more laid in irons, while 
 she buckles to the interpretation of it in all its parts ! 
 
 67. A fellow who treats you in all respects (the fee excepted) like his 
 physician ; unreservedly laying before you, while he is helping you at 
 dinner, all the minutest particulars of his most revolting ailments, from the 
 first attack down to the present moment > 
 
 " Morboruin quoque te causas, et signa docebo."* VIRG. 
 
 68. Walking in a wind that cuts to the bone, with a French or Ger- 
 man narrative companion, whose mind and body cannot move at the same 
 time ; or, in other words, who, as he gets on with his stories, thinks it 
 
 now will I rehearse 
 
 The birth and symptoms of each sore disease.
 
 94 THE 3OSER1ES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A calf tied to a waggln' tongue, by a balt-er without a bltt of compunction. 
 
 necessary, at every other sentence, to stand stock still, face about, and 
 make you do the same ; then, totally regardless of your shivering impa- 
 tience to push on, refuses to stir an inch, till the whole of his endless 
 thread is fairly wound out : 
 
 " Dixit, et adversi contra stetit ora," 
 
 Tes. " Juvenci ;" pray don't leave out that word ; for 
 what a calf must you be to stand still for him ! if you'd move 
 on he'd follow : such a fellow, with all his love of a dead 
 halt, would rather tell his stories at full speed than let you 
 escape them, take my word for it. 
 
 69. After a long and animated debate with a friend, in the dark, and 
 just as you have drawn forth all your strongest arguments, and are 
 beginning exultingly to infer from his long silence that you have com- 
 pletely worsted him, and that he has not another word to say receiving 
 his answer in a strong, steady snore, which s^ows him to have been in a 
 sweet sleep for the last quarter of an hour. 
 
 70. In a ball-room after long sitting, in profound meditation, on the 
 extreme edge of a form, with only one other person at the farther end, 
 being suddenly recalled from your absence by finding that you are amusing 
 the company with an involuntary somerset, brought on by the abrupt 
 departure of your counterpoise ; the bench (which had remained perfectly 
 gentle, as long as it carried double) seizing the opportunity of throwing 
 its astonished rider, without further ceremony, by furiously rearing at one 
 end, and plunging at the other. 
 
 71. Being called in as an umpire in a matrimonial quarrel, which 
 leaves you the choice of splitting on one of the six following rocks, viz. : 
 
 1. That of remaining silent (for which both parties hate you ; each 
 supposing that you secretly favor the other). 
 
 2. That of pronouncing that both are in the wrong (for which you 
 are, obviously, hated by both). 
 
 3. That of insinuating that both may be in the right (hated again
 
 TIIK MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 95 
 
 De vinoulo matrlmonii. 
 
 ou both sides : each being more enraged at your contre, than grateful for 
 your pour). 
 
 4. That of defending the lady at the expense of the gentleman (still 
 hated by both ; by her, for attacking her caro sposo, whom she will suffer 
 no one to despise but herself; by him, for siding with the enemy). 
 
 6. That of defending the gentleman at tin expense of the lady (this 
 case is, inversely, the same with the last). 
 
 6. That of endeavoring to make peace, by treating the matter " en 
 badinage" (for which both are far too much in earnest, as well as far too 
 eager for victory, not to hate you most of all). The best course, perhaps, 
 if you cannot steal away, is to be taken with a sudden and violent fit of 
 the toothache, which may last ad libitum. 
 
 Tes. Your concluding misery takes in two parties, and 
 should be divided between us : one moiety for you as a 
 bachelor, and the other for me as a Benedict. 
 
 Sen. I " remember those that are in bonds, as bound with 
 them." 
 
 Ned Tes. The bonds are like mort-gaye bonds in some 
 respects; but sometimes they bear no interest, when the 
 principle is all that holds them. 
 
 Sen. I can't help congratulating myself, however, since 
 you mention it, on being the consultee in the case, and not 
 the consultor. 
 
 Tes. Nonsense, my dear sir. You have all the pains of 
 the quarrel, without any of the delights of making up, which 
 follows in -natural succession. 
 
 Sen. I'll dispense with them, I thank you ; and sustain 
 myself under the dispensation, since the only way to ex- 
 perience them is, to quarrel with one's wife, and to do that 
 one must have a wife. I'm not dissipated myself, and am 
 not anxious that my property should be. A married man's
 
 96 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN' LIFE. 
 
 A father, tend-er to his offspring. 
 
 babies use up the money he earns by his labor, and destroy 
 the rest he earns by his weariness. 
 
 Ned Tes. He has to cry " by, by," literally, to them all 
 night, and they cry " buy, buy," figuratively, to him all day. 
 
 Sen. I say, hurrah for the bachelor ! " Long may he 
 wave," as they say of the star-spangled banner i. e., waive 
 all claims to untried privileges. And with that sentiment 
 we'll close, if you have got through with your budget, as I 
 have with mine. 
 
 Tes. Well, I should hope we had come to the end ! 
 
 Sen. As to social miseries 
 
 "THE OUP is FULL!"
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 97 
 
 Library troubles. The handsomer a book is, the more it seems open to in-speck-tion. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Library troubles. The handsomer a book Is, the more It seems open to in-speck- 
 tion. A book bound to be an annoyance in some way. Magazine literature. 
 A magazine of litter at your disposal. Sealing miseries which ought to "make 
 the very walls cry out." The "cacosthes scribendi" must have been among the 
 ' ,l<'t<i Roinanorum." Most authors write an infamous short-hand. AV--/y/// 
 personified. The printer is aw<Aor-ized to offer the incredulous convincing proo/s. 
 
 Sen. We have no subject booked for to-day. 
 
 Tes. Let us subject books, themselves, to our miseries. 
 They have often enough subjected us to theirs. 
 
 Sen. Well, here we are, in the library, the very dominions 
 of our theme, and these shelves are the very palace of the 
 realm. 
 
 Ned Tes. There are a great many pages weight on the 
 palace. 
 
 Sen. We should not have to look far for miseries if their 
 services could be transferred to us, and each page author-ized 
 to set down its own. 
 
 1. Reading over a passage in an author, for the hundredth time, with- 
 out coming an inch nearer to the meaning of it at the last reading than at 
 the first ; then passing over it in despair, but without being able to enjoy 
 the rest of the book, from the painful consciousness of your own real or 
 supposed stupidity. 
 
 2. As you are reading drowsily by the fire, letting your book fall into 
 the ashes, so as to lose your place, rumple and grime the leaves, and 
 throw out your papers of reference; then, on rousing and recollecting 
 yourself, finding that you do not know a syllable of what you have been 
 winking over for the last hour. 
 
 5
 
 98 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A book bound to be an annoyance in some way. 
 
 3. In reading a new and interesting book, being reduced to make a 
 paper-knife of your finger. 
 
 4. Unfolding a very complicated map in a borrowed book of value, 
 and, notwithstanding all your care, enlarging the small rent you originally 
 made in it, every time you open it 
 
 /Sen. Apropos of maps : 
 
 5. Hunting on a cold scent, in a map for a place in a book for a 
 passage in a variety of dictionaries for a word thrown out at last quite 
 at fault. 
 
 6. Reading a comedy aloud, " by particular desire," when you are 
 half asleep, and quite stupid. 
 
 7. In attempting, at a strange house, to take down a large book from 
 a high, crowded shelf, bringing half the library upon your nose. 
 
 8. Mining through a subject, or science, "invita (or rather exosd) 
 Minerva," purely from the shame of ignorance. 
 
 9. Receiving, " from the author," a book equally heavy in the literal 
 and the figurative sense ; accompanied with entreaties that you would 
 candidly set down in writing your detailed opinions of it in all its parts. 
 
 10. Reading a borrowed book so terribly well bound, that you are 
 obliged to peep your way through it, for fear of breaking the stitches, or 
 the leather, if you fairly open it ; and which, consequently, shuts with a 
 spring, if left a moment to itself 
 
 11. Yes ; or, after you have long been reading the said book close by 
 the fire, (which is not quite so ceremonious, as you are about opening it,) 
 attempting in vain to shut it, the covers violently flapping back in a 
 warped curve in counteracting which you crack the leather irreparably 
 in a dozen places. 
 
 Ned Tes. There is one way I wish some borrowed books 
 1 know of were bound.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 99 
 
 Magazine literature. A magazine of litter K your disposal. 
 
 Sen. How is that, Ned 1 
 
 Ned Tes. Homeward bound. 
 
 Sen. Ha, ha ! That would be a time to keep carnival 
 indeed. 
 
 Ned Tes. Which would not be appropriate while the 
 books were keeping Lent. 
 
 Sen. That brings us by no violent transition to the next 
 misery on the file. 
 
 1 2. On taking a general survey of your disordered library, for the 
 purpose of re-arranging it rinding a variety of broken sets, and odd 
 volumes, of valuable works, which you had supposed to be complete ; 
 and then, after screwing up your brows upon it for an hour, finding your- 
 self wholly unable to recollect to whom any one of the missing books has 
 been lent, or even to guess what has become of them ; and, at the same 
 time, without having the smallest hope of ever being able to replace them. 
 Likewise, 
 
 13. Your pamphlets and loose printed sheets daily getting ahead, and 
 running mountain high upon your shelves, before you have summoned 
 courage to tame them, by sorting and sending them to the binder 
 
 14. As an author those moments during which you are relieved from 
 the fatigues of composition by finding that your memory, your intellects, 
 your imagination, your spirits, and even the love of your subject, have all, 
 as if with one consent, left you in the lurch. 
 
 15. In coming to that paragraph of a newspaper, for the sake of which 
 you have bought it, finding, in that only spot, the paper blurred, or left 
 white by the press. 
 
 16. Reading newspaper poetry, which, by a sort of fatality which you 
 can neither explain nor resist, you occasionally slave through, in the midst 
 of the utmost repugnance and disgust 
 
 17. As you are eagerly taking up a newspaper, being yawningly told 
 by one who has just laid it down, that " there is nothing in it ;" or the said
 
 100 THE MISERIES OF JIUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Sealing miseries which ought to " make the very walls cry out" 
 
 paper sent for by the lender, at the moment when you are beginning to 
 read it 
 
 18. Having your ears invaded all the morning long, close at your study 
 window, by the quack of ducks, and the cackle of hens, with an occasional 
 base accompaniment by au ass. 
 
 19. Writing a long letter, with a very hard pen, on very thin and very 
 greasy paper, with very pale ink, to one whom you wish I needn't say 
 where*. 
 
 20. On arriving at that part of the last volume of an enchanting novel, 
 in which the interest is wrought up to the highest pitch suddenly finding 
 the remaining leaves, catastrophe and all, torn out. 
 
 21. Burning your fingers with an inch of sealing-wax ; and then drop- 
 ping away the dime to which you are reduced by the want of a seal 
 
 22. In writing neither sand, blotting paper, nor a fire, to dry your 
 paper ; so that, though in violent haste, you sit with your hands before 
 you, at the end of every other page, till the ink thinks proper to dry of 
 itself; or toiling your wrist, for ten minutes together, with a sand-glass 
 that throws out two or three damp grains at a time, and, in consequence 
 of such delay (but this calamity deserves a separate commemoration) 
 
 23. Losing the post ; and this, when you would about as willingly lose 
 your life. 
 
 24. Emptying the ink-glass, (by mistake for the sand-glass,) on a 
 paper which you have just written out fairly, and then widening the mis- 
 chief by applying restive blotting-paper. 
 
 25. Putting a wafer, of the size of a half-dollar piece, into a letter 
 with so narrow a fold, that one half of the circle stands out in sight, and 
 is presently smeared over the paper by your fingers in stamping the con- 
 cealed half. 
 
 26. Writing on the creases of paper that has been sharply folded.
 
 WAU sryoK 
 
 "" THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 101 
 
 The " cacootlu-s scribendi " must have been among the " Jeata Roniaiioruia." 
 
 27. In sealing a letter the wax in so very melting a mood, as fre- 
 quently to leave a burning kiss on your hand, instead of the paper ; next, 
 when you have applied the seal, and all, at last, seems over, said wax 
 voluntarily " rendering up its trust," the moment after it has undertaken it 
 So much for " Fyn tigellak ; well brand, en vast houdT 
 
 28. Writing at the top of a very long sheet of paper, so that you 
 either rumple and crease the lower end of it with your arm against the 
 table, in bringing it lower down, or bruise your chest, and drive out sill 
 your breath, in stretching forward to the upper end. 
 
 Ned Tes. Long as it is, to begin with, you find it in creases 
 as you go on down. 
 
 29. Straining your eyes over a book in the twilight, at the rate of 
 about five minutes per line, before it occurs to you to order candles ; and 
 when they arrive, finding that you have totally lost the sense of what you 
 have been reading, by the tardy operation of getting it at piecemeal. 
 
 30. Attempting to erase writing ; but, in fact, only scratching holes in 
 the paper. 
 
 31. Writing at the same rickety table with another, who employs his 
 shoulder, elbow, and body more actively than his fingers. 
 
 32. Writing, on the coldest day in the year, in the coldest room in the 
 house, by. a fire which has sworn not to bum ; and so, perpetually dropping 
 your full pen upon your paper, out of the five icicles with which you 
 vainly endeavor to hold it 
 
 83. A pen that makes nothing but blots that seems to be made 
 solely for a medium to receive the ink from the inkstand, and scatter it 
 over the sheet, putting it in deep mourning. 
 
 Ned Tes. A pen of a pen-sieve turn. 
 
 84. To drop your gold pen on the floor, and pick it up with the points 
 curled up, so as to resemble the things the children make out of dandelion 
 
 , and call " rams' horns."
 
 102 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Most authors write n infamous short-hand. Sin-copy personified. 
 
 35. While wntiug with a pencil, to dash the point into the inkstand 
 through absence of mind. 
 
 36. Writing with ink of about the consistency of pitch, -which leaves 
 alternately a blot and a blank 
 
 37. Writing a long letter with one or more of the cut fingers of your 
 right hand bundled up ; or else (for more comfort) with your left hand. 
 
 Tes. The miseries of writing lead naturally to the miseries 
 of printing, if we only knew any thing about it. 
 
 Sen. Yes ; and the more miserable the former, the more 
 the latter must have to complain of. Many an unfortunate 
 " Jour" could tell us of poor men, whose time is their money, 
 spending half of it in making out illegible "copy," and the 
 other half in correcting what they had set up, because no 
 mortal man (not even a printer) could guess right at the 
 author's meaning the first time. 
 
 Ned Tes. And the foreman could tell of teaching the trade 
 to a boy of a ^n'-ous turn ; which, curiously enough, is rather 
 conducive to profanity than piety in the teacher. 
 
 Tes. If our mass of scraps were ever to go to the print- 
 er, we had better save a place to put in what he has to say 
 about his troubles, for he certainly would experience them 
 all! 
 
 Sen. But what shall we attack next time ? 
 
 Tes. My friend. Can we dare we make what we eat 
 and drink the subject of thought for one sitting ? 
 
 Sen. Testy, pardon my weakness, but spare me this. 
 
 " Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis foUy to be wise." 
 
 Foolhardiness is not bravery. There are mysteries into 
 which it is not meant that we should inquire.
 
 THE MISEKIP:S OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 103 
 
 The printer is atUhor-lzod to offer the incredulous convincing proof*. 
 
 Tes. Still I don't like the idea of turning back, after 
 having marched up to the citadel. No, no ; we'll enter, and 
 do our duty without shrinking. 
 
 Ned Tes. As the boys always say to both sides in a fight, 
 
 'GO IS AND WIN.
 
 104 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Eating annoyances. The Devil sends cooks, so there's the devil to pay. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Eating annoyances. The Devil sends cooks, so there's the devil to pay. The cheap 
 eating-house in two phases. Din or dinner. The most thriving bug in New York, 
 except hum-bug. An enc-roach-ment on our liberties. The upper 10,000 vs. the 
 lower 430,000 for lie-ability and reliability. An imported article of domestic*. 
 The hrick-in-hod-and-in-hat-carrying race's aptness for all sorts of fabrication. 
 The declension of boarding-houses favorable to the conjugation of bachelors. A 
 moving theme. Con-fusion, i. e., a melting together. Boarding-houses, not to be 
 nccnsed of un-chary -table-ness. Efforts at carving proving rather a hindrance than 
 a help. Specimens of gold~t>aring quartz from the dough-minions of the baker. 
 A formal dinner. Courses that are not race-courses. The binn, proved to be a 
 Mil, by the hermit that comes out. A good roll on the carpet buttered sid 
 down. Contrariness is the won't of things. What's a-curd to sour your temper? 
 The cold chairy-teas of the world 1 Beer miseries that have nothing to do with 
 the Jterry-ing that follows. A preparation sooted to the most fastidious taste. 
 Making a mull of it. 
 
 Sen. The Table ought to furnish good fare for our mis- 
 eries to fatten and increase on. 
 
 Tes. So it would, except that it is so intimately connected 
 with all the rest. Travelling, boarding, society, &c., all look 
 to the universal operations of eating and drinking as opening 
 assailable points for their efforts against the comfort of man- 
 kind. However, it is worth while to try a few, even at the 
 risk of some repetition of miseries included under other 
 heads. So let us devote this chapter exclusively to the table. 
 
 Ned Tes. It's " all a board that's going." By the by, the 
 Chapter on the Table ought to be illustrated with plates. 
 
 Tes. (in perfect innocence* of his son's duplicity of mean- 
 
 * Innocence in no sense but that, however ; for if Ned had had more 
 punishment in the past, he would not have perpetrated so many puuuish 
 meanings in the present.
 
 THE J//.s7.Vi'//:.V OF HUMAN LIFE. 105 
 
 The cheap eating-house in two phases. Din or dinner. 
 
 ings.) Yes, a good cut or steel-engraving would be very ap- 
 propriate to set off the dullness of a dinner misery. But 
 Mrs. T. ought to be here to start us off with some of the 
 agonies of a hostess ; such as seeing the appearance of her 
 pretty and tasteful table ruined by the inopportune oversetting 
 <>!' ;i gravy-boat, &c., &c. 
 
 Sen. Even the best of us are subject to such accidents. 
 
 Ned Tes. Clergymen themselves sometimes forget the 
 respect due to the cloth. 
 
 Sen. Boarding-houses should not be excluded. They are 
 parliceps criminis with all feeding discomforts, especially 
 eating-houses. These belong together as naturally as mutton 
 and turnips. 
 
 Tes. Thank heaven, the reign of both is over, as far as I 
 am concerned, since I went to housekeeping. 
 
 Ned Tes. You are no longer under the dine-nasty of 
 eating-houses 
 
 Tes. Nor bored with another family under the same 
 roof. 
 
 Sen. Well do i remember the time, Testy, when it was 
 " neck or nothing" with me between a cheap eating-house, or 
 no dinner ! I have scarcely the heart to abuse them, on that 
 account ; but I can tell you how one would strike me now, 
 without denying heartfelt and stomach-felt obligations to them 
 in times gone by. 
 
 1. The noise is deafening. Every body is in a hurry money-taker, 
 carvers, waiters, and guests. Every thing is hot and smoking, waiters 
 included, as they rush back and forth as if possessed, each bringing six, 
 seven, or eight plates of food arranged, with complicated ingenuity, on one 
 red hand and naked arm, while the other hand grasps twelve, fourteen, or 
 sixteen knives and forks to match. Then when he turns back, he roars 
 out the names of the incongruous dishes his next load is to be composed 
 of. " Tew plates rose-beef rose porkanonions plumhard bolasoop 
 
 5*
 
 106 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The most thriving bug in N. Y. except hum-bug. An enc-roach-ment on our liberties. 
 
 fried clams Indian-both-kinds," <fec. Four times have the other three 
 places at your table been emptied and filled while you were taking your 
 moderate meal, and twelve people have dined, orders given, food swal- 
 lowed, and leavings cleared away within four feet of you ! 
 
 Sen. That is a specimen of the dinner disagreeable. Now 
 if you want one of the dinner disgusting, go in the latter part 
 of the afternoon to the same place. 
 
 2. All is silence and solitude, reminding one of a desert rather than a 
 dinner. The owner is reading a paper behind his money desk, the waiters 
 are congregated in the dim distance, and the chairs are all turned up with 
 their seats on the tables and their legs in the air. One of them is turned 
 down for your accommodation. If there is a table-cloth, it looks like a 
 faintly -colored map of the world. If there is none, the waiter wipes off 
 the table with an air disgustingly brisk, and a damp cloth that leaves a 
 track of its wrinkles, inevitably suggesting hair to the squeamish looker-on. 
 The butter has no knife in it, but probably has had many a one during 
 the day. It is of the consistency of mud, and some water, that was ice 
 hours ago, surrounds it, making a perfect puddle. The knife leaves a 
 distinctly marked continent on the map where you wipe it, and the fork 
 has three tines and two deposits of black dust betweea When the 
 dinner arrives, the roast veal (your abomination, and the last thing they 
 have left) is very pale, and looks decidedly unwell, though fever certainly 
 is not what is the matter with it. It has no more appearance of steam 
 than the palm of your hand ; and yet it has seen a good deal of cooking 
 in its day, if four hours of lukewarmness can be so called. You roll up 
 your eyes in despair, and they encounter an enormous cockroach prome- 
 nading the brim of your hat, as it hangs, and calmly contemplating the 
 scene 1 
 
 Tes. What a blast ! The eating-houses would show but a 
 " beggarly account of empty boxes" to-morrow, if all their 
 customers were to see this last misery. 
 
 Sen. I am glad they will not, then ; for this particular 
 class of restaurants has some pleasant points about it. Pro- 
 vision is made so cheaply there for the poorest. A man
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 107 
 
 The upper 10,000 ri. the lower 490,000 for He-ability and reliability. 
 
 must be very hungry whom a shilling spent there would leave 
 unsatisfied. And, although this advantage brings there, of 
 course, the very lowest class of industrious society, yet each 
 man or boy, apprentice or journeyman, or whatever he may 
 be, is trusted to state his own account to the clerk, and pay 
 for it, with no check on his veracity. This is a feature that 
 gives me real pleasure to see, as it adds one to the many 
 proofs we have of the honesty and honor of that class of 
 Americans, even in this great, mixed-up, corrupt city. 
 
 Tes. Well, I'm glad you find it so. For my part, I see 
 much more of dishonesty, trickery, suspicion, and such little 
 meannesses as we were speaking of in a former sitting, than 
 of the proofs you mention. 
 
 Sen. Very possibly. But consider how far these are to 
 be charged on the particular class I spoke of. 
 
 Tes. Robberies and burglaries are more common than 
 ever, and, what is perhaps still more significant no arrests 
 without rewards ! 
 
 Sen. Ah, there you attack the government, which is inde- 
 fensible. Does it not rather show what a people it is, when 
 such a government is sufficient ? We'll serve them out some 
 day. Just now we are otherwise occupied. 
 
 3. Changing your boarding-house, and, on the charitable recommenda- 
 tion of a friend, (not made in charity to you,) finding yourself ensconced in 
 a high, cheap house, smelling of paint and pine, and to which the epithet 
 " brand-nev/' is exactly appropriate. The height of the house and of the 
 charges, however, made up for by the lowness of the people you are 
 thrown with : new in their business, and bringing to it exaggerated 
 notions of the necessity of self-consideration to prevent being overreached 
 by the " sharp Yorkers." People who start with the idea that you will 
 try to get just as much out of their house as you can. 
 
 Tes. That is one of those ideas that bring about their own
 
 108 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 An imported article of domestics. 
 
 consummation, for I should certainly try to get myself out as 
 soon as possible. 
 
 Ned Tes. As soon as you had found them out, they would 
 find you " out, and not expected back," in spite of their plans 
 for taking you in. 
 
 Sen. Reduced gentle-folks seem the very people for that 
 profession, just as the London Quarterly kindly hints that 
 their daughters are made for governesses. Our selfishness 
 would always be glad to find that our hosts had come down 
 to that station rather than have them of those who had risen 
 to it. " They are so much easier to deal with." And the 
 sharper ones would have got out of us a great deal, that it is 
 generosity to give to the others ! O human nature ! 
 
 Tes. Well, it is not that entirely. The under -bred ones 
 are so intimate and familiar with the servants as to make 
 them of little service to you, except as temper-trials. They 
 are too smart for their business, and either answer " of 
 course" to your directions, or else differ with you as to what 
 is to be done. This state of mind is worse than the most 
 stolid stupidity in a domestic. 
 
 Sen. Infinitely worse. 
 
 Tes. And that is saying a great deal, when you consider 
 how much stupidity means in a raw immigrant. 
 
 Ned Tes. Raw specimens, indeed, but not at all rare. 
 
 Tes. There are four bells hanging in my kitchen, and our 
 chambermaids, (and they are neither few nor far between 
 not like angels' visits in any respect, in fact,) our chamber- 
 maids, literally, never learn which room each bell belongs to. 
 
 Ned Tes. No matter how often they are tolled. 
 
 Tes. They stop at the front and back parlors, and the back 
 bedroom, before they answer the bell of my room, which is 
 the second floor front !
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 109 
 
 The brick -In-hod-and-in-hat-carry ing race's aptness for all sorts of fabrication. 
 
 Ned Tes. You have had a bell made for every chamber, 
 now you will have to have a chambermaid for every bell. 
 / should like to bespeak belles for chambermaids, at the 
 same time, in place of the hags our house is usually em- 
 bellished with. 
 
 Tes. However, never doing any thing she is not told to, 
 goes far toward atoning for a girl's rarely doing the thing she 
 is told to. But, O Sensitive, there is one thing that dullness 
 can neither atone for nor prevent one art, that we most of 
 us consider rather difficult to practice well ; that even the 
 stupidest native of a certain isle, often described as " dear " 
 and " green," is proficient in, and plies, naturally consistent- 
 ly ingeniously industriously enthusiastically. As a late 
 writer has strongly expressed it: "The whole nation, from 
 the peer in his ermine to the piasant in his cot, will lie" 
 
 Sen. 1 understand you. The nation referred to is prolific 
 in patriots, pat-riots, and potatoes, and the last is the only one 
 of their staples that ever fails. I have often thought that the 
 harp should be scratched out from their national emblem, and 
 a certain kindred musical instrument substituted adding 
 another to the queer list of heraldic puns. 
 
 Tes. That would be as unkind a cut as the one of Dean 
 Swift's, who, as he says himself, 
 
 Left the little wealth he had 
 To found a house for fools and mad ; 
 To show, by one satiric touch, 
 No nation needs it half so much." 
 
 Ned Tes. But not more severe than adopting the triple- faced 
 sham-rock ; which insinuates that there is no subject, however 
 hard and unpromising, but they can make a deception of. 
 
 " Sermons in stones, and good in every thing."
 
 110 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The declension of boarding-bouses favorable to the conjugation of bachelors. 
 
 They find fictions 
 
 Good ones in stones, and some in every thing. 
 
 Tes. All this, however, is aside from the subject in hand. 
 Let us " take board"" and pursue it to the death. 
 
 Ned Tes. Bored to death with a vengeance. 
 
 Tes. If there is any thing worse than boarding in an estab- 
 lishment just started, it is living in one just going to stop. 
 The indifference, low spirits, and preoccupation of the people 
 after deciding on another business, and before breaking up the 
 old, would furnish an inmate a full excuse for suicide. I 
 wouldn't call it insanity if I were on the jury. 
 
 Sen. I should say it indicated common sense to an uncom- 
 mon degree. 
 
 Ned Tes. I should go for a verdict, " In sanity" in per- 
 fect sanity. 
 
 Tes. If I wished to change the condition of the most im- 
 practicable old bachelor on earth, I would choose the month of 
 April no, Sensitive, not because it is led off by all-fools-day 
 that is an ill-natured bachelorism you would not venture 
 upon if Mrs. Testy were in the room nor yet because it is 
 the natural mating-time for doves and other feathered bipeds, 
 geese included ; but because I could then find, in this city, 
 five hundred boarding-houses, whose keepers had determined 
 to try something else after the first of May. Even suppose 
 he stands that trial, he is sure to be moved by May-day. If 
 he survives the regular New York May fete 
 
 Ned Tes. May fate preserve him. 
 
 Tes. If he lives through the first, he will not risk the delay 
 of a second before resolving on a change of condition. My 
 plan would be certain to succeed. I should not despair, even 
 of you, Sensitive, if you boarded ! I should expect to see
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. Ill 
 
 A moving theme. Con-fusion, i. e., a melting together. 
 
 you transformed in co "an industrious, hard-working man, with 
 a large wife and family," as the newspapers say, in one season 
 of May confusion. 
 
 Sen. May confusion seize on me, if you ever do ! Ila, ha, 
 ha ! I'm not a man to give myself heirs. A menage first 
 and a menagerie as soon afterwards as practicable, in the reg- 
 ular course of nature, I suppose. No, no, Testy. You have 
 faith to remove mountains, if you really believe what you 
 say, and had better let it out to take the place of the Iloosac 
 tunnel-borer. You married men are unanimous in railing 
 ;i<,r;iinst bachelorhood, because you have not the choice between 
 the two states. As long as a man stays single, he has the 
 choice between them, and no longer. / have liberty, discre- 
 tion, freedom, in the matter. " My rights there are none to 
 dispute." 
 
 Ned Tes. That sentence is ambiguous. You mean, there 
 are none to dispute a bachelor's rights. I rather think it 
 ought to be rendered, a bachelor has no rights to be disputed. 
 
 Sen. Let's-change the subject. Revenons a nos moutons, 
 although it is only to mutton cold, returning to boarding, 
 houses, and to cut blocks with a razor, to try our wit on board- 
 ing-house keepers. I have boarded for years, when I was a 
 poor clerk. Did you ever, when you were young and used 
 to do foolish things, board in a family " that didn't take board- 
 ers ?" There are a great many people even in this plain spok- 
 en age of the world, when every thing is, or pretends to be, 
 called by its right name, and its shortest who " allow a lim- 
 ited number of their friends to become inmates of their fami- 
 ly" for a consideration, and think themselves, in diplomatic 
 phrase, entitled to the highest consideration. 
 
 Tes. " Make yourself at home. We treat you without 
 ceremony, quite as one of the family." How often do I hear
 
 112 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Boardlng-honses, not to b accused of un-chary-table-ness. 
 
 that ! Sometimes by way of substitute even for the cares of 
 hospitality ! I always feel like answering that I form part 
 of no family except my own, and that I prefer being treated 
 with a little ceremony as a guest, as I should treat them in 
 welcoming them at my house. Make myself at home indeed ! 
 That was not what I came away from home for. 
 
 Sen. But these boarding-house people, who do not take 
 boarders, profess to treat you as neither more nor less than 
 one of themselves. That they live up to the first part of their 
 professions, you need no help in finding out. Your own 
 nerves and senses would tell you, even if the lady did not 
 continually remind you, that they are no more solicitous of 
 your comfort than of each other's ; while universal experience 
 tells us that they cannot in human nature do as much. To 
 make up for the lack of that sympathy that nothing but a 
 habitual family affection can establish that they could not 
 offer without it, and that you could not receive without 
 it all entertainers, whether for hire or for hospitality, ought 
 to calculate on giving more luxuries and more personal 
 attention. 
 
 Tes. Very true. But don't, pray, give or get the idea 
 that it can possibly be more than tolerable at the best. The 
 life of a boarder is not living it's only staying, after all, and 
 always will be till there arises a more sensible and practica- 
 ble race of boarding-house keepers. 
 
 Ned Tes. People with fair common-sense abilities without 
 common sensibilities. 
 
 Tes. Neither the boarding-house life nor the boarding- 
 house keepers deserve the consideration you show them. 
 
 Sen. There I disagree with you. I think they deserve a 
 great deal more ; for O Testy ! put all our miseries of 
 boarding into one scale, and I can put one in the other, of
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 113 
 
 Efforts at carving proving rather ft hindrance than a hlp. 
 
 half-a-dozen words, that will make them kick the beam, as 
 if they had a personal spite against it 
 
 4. To be a boarding-house keeper I 
 Tes. Well, let them go. 
 
 5. After having been very hungry all the morning, finding, as you sit 
 down to an excellent dinner, that your appetite has secretly decamped. 
 
 6. On entering the dining-room, half famished, with the fullest expec- 
 tation of seeing the dinner on the table not even the cloth laid. 
 
 7. Sitting down, with a keen appetite, to a beef-steak, (and nothing 
 else,) which proves to be completely charred by overdressing. 
 
 Tes. Confound 'em ! none of them ever attend to Mac- 
 beth's receipt for dressing a beef-steak, though by much the 
 best that ever was given. 
 
 -" when 'tis done, 'twere well 
 
 If 'twere done quickly." 
 
 8. In a college hall sitting at dinner on a bench nailed to the floor, 
 and this at such a distance from the table, (nailed down also,) that you 
 feed in the position of a rower just beginning his stroke. 
 
 9. Slicing at a large round of beef, (near which your Evil Genius has 
 seated you,) with a very short-bladed knife, so as inevitably to grease its 
 handle, your fingers, and the cuff of your coat ; the company, as if in a plot 
 to drive you out of your senses, scarcely tasting of any thing else. 
 
 Ned Tes. O, a long knife for a large joint, by all means ; 
 both for nicety's sake, and because 
 
 " Fortiter et melius magnets plerumque SECAT res." 
 
 10. After forward ly offering vour services in cutting up a goose, l>eing 
 obliged! to make a practical confession, before twenty watchful witnesses, 
 that you have no genius for carving.
 
 114 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Specimens of gold-baring quartz from the dougli-mtnions of the baker. 
 
 1 1. Attempting to cut and help out cauliflower, or asparagus, with a 
 spoon : the fate of the cargo (which you had neglected to insure) is 
 well known : ditto as to jelly, which instantly bids adieu to the spoon, and 
 quivers tike quicksilver about the cloth. 
 
 12. The spinning plate there is but one, and you always have it 
 
 13. Missing the way to your mouth, and drowning your breast in a 
 bath of ice-water. 
 
 14. The moment in which you discover that you have taken in a 
 mouthful of fat, by mistake, for turnip. 
 
 1 5. Finding a human hair in your mouth, which, as you slowly draw 
 it forth, seems to lengthen ad infinitum. 
 
 16. A strong twang of tallow, or onion, in your bread and butter, at a 
 house where decorum forbids you either to splutter or sputter. 
 
 Tes. Indeed if a man mayn't " quarrel with his bread 
 and butter" in this case, I don't know when he may ! For 
 my own part, whenever mine is flavored in this way, I don't 
 stop to think what house I'm in, I can tell you. 
 
 17. Long after you have finished your own temperate meal, seeing 
 the sixth or eighth plate of turtle, venison, <fcc, conveyed into a living 
 larder immediately opposite to you. 
 
 18. Grinding on upon tough sinewy meat with supposititious teeth. 
 
 19. A stone lurking in your crust, which you crush with such violence 
 as to drive out a tooth-filling and an oath at the same time. 
 
 20. Laboring at a piece of meat (corned beef in particular) with a 
 carving-knife so blunt, that it does not penetrate above a hair's breadth in 
 a dozen seesaws, and keeps slipping from its hold, leaving you no chance 
 of getting a slice less than an: inch thick ; and this is presently returned for 
 a thinner one, which, if you are able to cut at all, you cut only by
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 115 
 
 A formal dinner. Courses that are not race-courses. 
 
 21. Inviting a friend, (whom you know to be particularly fond of the 
 dish,) to partake of a fine hare, haunch, Ac., which you have endeavored 
 to keep exactly to the critical moment, but which ia no sooner brought iu 
 than the whole party, with one nose, order it to be taken out. 
 
 Ned Tes. It can't be helped. 
 
 22. Biting a piece of your cheek almost out, and then perpetually 
 catching it between your teeth, during the remainder of your meal, and 
 for a fortnight afterwards. 
 
 23. At dinner, in the dog-days seeing several copies of the grain of 
 the servant's thumb printed off in a hot mist upon the rim of your plate. 
 
 24. After having completely dined upon one or two things which you 
 are not at all fond of seeing your favorite dish, which had not been 
 announced, brought in excellently dressed. 
 
 25. Slipping your knife suddenly and violently from off a bone its 
 edge first shrieking across the plate, (so as to make you hated by yourself, 
 and the whole company,) and then driving the plate before it, and lodging 
 all its contents meat, gravy, melted butter, vegetables, Ac., Ac. partly 
 on your own breeches, partly on the cloth, partly on the floor, but princi- 
 pally on the lap of a charming girl who sits by you, and to whom you had 
 been diligently endeavoring to recommend yourself. 
 
 26. At a formal dinner the awful resting time which occasionally 
 intervenes between the courses. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Inde alios ineunt, cur sits aliosque re-cursus 
 Adversis spatiis /" Vmo. 
 
 27. After you have long been fingering and peeling fresh walnuts, 
 looking about in vain for some of the skins, (all swept away,) for the pur- 
 pose of rubbing off the stains : nails unusually long. 
 
 28. Dropping in upon a friend at the dinner-hour, upon the strength 
 of his general invitation, and discovering, from the countenance and man- 
 ner of his lady, that you'd better have waited for a particular one.
 
 116 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The binn, proved to be a sell, by the hermit that comes out. 
 
 29. A fish-bone, or other substance, stuck between your two hindmost 
 teeth ; then, in your endeavors to remove it with a toothpick, only wedging 
 it tighter than ever. 
 
 30. In decanting wine receiving a hint that it is time to stop, from 
 the liquor, as it suddenly gurgles down the sides of the full decanter over 
 your hands and the floor. N. B. The like effects of the like want of 
 caution in the still more terrible instance of filling an inkstand. 
 
 31. Triumphantly producing from your cellar the last remaining bottle 
 of some choice old wine, previously announced to your friends as the boast 
 of the binn ; but which, when decanted, shows an aspect so desperately 
 cloudy, that no exposure to the fire can prevail upon it to brighten up. 
 
 32. On receiving and opening several hampers of precious wine, just 
 arrived from a great distance finding that the bottles have almost all 
 bled to death, in consequence of quarrelling and fighting by the way. 
 
 Tes. So much for the comfort of sitting down to dinner! 
 But there are other meals, you know : so now 
 
 " To breakfast, with what appetite we may." 
 
 The less the better, indeed, on the following occasion, with 
 which I will begin : 
 
 33. To know, always, what you are to have for breakfast, by remem- 
 bering what you had for dinner the day before, which your hosts do not 
 take the trouble to hash, but serve a little warmed and much disfigured 
 by wear and tear. 
 
 Ned Tes. " Second 'dishiu'," as the newsboys would say. 
 
 34. On coming down late to a hasty breakfast finding the last drop of 
 water in your kettle boiling away, the toast in the ashes, and the cat just 
 finishing the cream. 
 
 35. Making the hopeless circuit of the herb teas aage balm rose-
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 117 
 
 A good roll on the carpet buttered tide down. 
 
 mary, <fcc., fec., when the doctor has laid his paw upon your tea-chest; 
 till you are, at last, left completely bankrupt in breakfast 
 
 Tes. As for myself, between the mischief to my nerves, 
 
 if I do drink tea, and to my comfort if I do not 
 
 Ned Tes. You may cry with Martial, 
 
 " Nee TEA-CWWI possum vivere,' nee sine TEA."* 
 
 36. After having dealt carelessly with honey at breakfast, being hur- 
 ried away, without a moment allowed for washing your hands. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Plus aloes quam mellis habeff Juv. 
 
 37. In the depth of winter trying in vain to effect a union between 
 unsoftened butter, and the crumb of a very stale loaf, or a quite new one. 
 
 Sen. I have often wondered that neither the Inquisitors, 
 nor the cannibal savages, when they have been out of tor- 
 tures, have hit upon either of these. 
 
 88. Letting fall (of course on the buttered side) the piece of roll, or 
 muffin, on which you had set your heart 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " hoeret lateri lethalis !" VIRG. 
 
 39. As you sit at breakfast suddenly breaking down the back of 
 your chair, and, in a failing attempt to save yourself in your fall, kicking 
 up the table with the comfort, however, of preserving the tea-urn, cups, 
 plates, <tc., <fec. : all of which you deliver safely into the lap of the lady of 
 the house, who sits opposite 1 
 
 * Nee tecum possum vivere, nee sine te. Neither with thee can I live, 
 nor without thee. Bos. JOHNS. 
 
 \ That savors more of the aloe than of the honey more bitter than 
 sweet
 
 118 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Contrariness is tlio won't of things. What's a-curd to sour your temper? 
 
 40. Being roused from a reverie at breakfast, by hastily swallowing a 
 dose of very strong tea, in which both the cream and the sugar have been 
 forgotten. 
 
 41. Trying often to harpoon a floating pat of butter, which, as often, 
 slips aside, or ducks and shirks under your knife ; no effect but that of 
 splashing up the water against your hand : 
 
 -" dum te fugeret per flumina, prseceps 
 
 Excidet aut in aquas tenues dilapeus abibit" VIBO. 
 
 42. A teapot which won't pour except through the top what you 
 intend for your cup trickling down your fingers into your sleeve, and over 
 the cloth. 
 
 43. As you are shaking a muffineer, (ditto a pepper castor at dinner,) 
 the cover springing off the whole contents instantly following the lively 
 example. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " agmine facto, 
 
 Qua data porta ruunt" VIRO. 
 
 44. "Weak, bad, cold, cloudy coffee, with poor milk, and but little of 
 
 that Likewise, tea made with smoke, as well as water. 
 f 
 
 45. On pouring the milk into your tea, to see it rise to the surface in 
 small curds, while the body of the liquid remains transparent 
 
 46. Venturing upon a small egg with a large spoon, and so feeding 
 your chin, your neckcloth, your ringers, and the cloth ; every tiling, in 
 short but your mouth 1 
 
 Ned Tes. This is " ab ovo usque ad mala" with a ven- 
 geance ! 
 
 Tex. But we have had enough of breakfasting. There 
 remains only one meal more ; and we have too often " svpp'd 
 full with horrors," to doubt that we shall find a few more 
 miseries in that quarter. 
 
 Sen. At one of those miserable modern substitutes for-the
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 119 
 
 The cold chalry-ta of the world I 
 
 old-fashioned tea-party, where they give every man his own 
 cover to hold, 
 
 47. When you are fixed with a cup in one hand, and a plate in the 
 other to have anything happen ; especially an irresistible inclination to 
 sneeze come over you, which you foresee will come to a climax before you 
 can reach the piano or mantelpiece, set down your incumbrance, and get 
 out your handkerchief. 
 
 Ned Tes. Lap-tea, is only fit for cats and other animals 
 with the same unsatisfactory drinking apparatus. 
 
 Tes. Tea is not much of a meal, any way ; take it off the 
 tea-table, and it is good fornothing. 
 
 Ned Tes. Though, on the contrary, the tea-table becomes 
 eatable when the T is taken off. 
 
 Sen. Men's knees you can scarcely call laps. 
 
 Ned Tes. They can col-laj^e themselves if you try to im- 
 pose i pon them. To balance a teacup is not 
 
 A KNKES-V TASK.
 
 120 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Br*r miseries that have nothing to do with the berry-ing that follows. 
 
 48. In eating lobster getting the lady, or half-a-dozen of the dead 
 man's fingers, into your mouth, before you are aware. 
 
 49. The repeated slips of a blunt oyster-knife against the palm of your 
 left hand, as you are dislocating your right shoulder with laboring in vain 
 at the wide end of the shell 
 
 Tes. Very provoking, certainly were it not that some of 
 your oysters pretty often make you amends for the stubborn- 
 ness of others, by opening of themselves ! But, if you are 
 fond of oysters, I'll give you enough of them. 
 
 50. Supping upon roasted oysters with" the snatching, and burning, 
 and hissing, and grinning, and cluttering, that go with it leaving you no 
 comfort but in thinking of the moment when all will be swept away, and 
 the water-glasses brought round. 
 
 Sen. The following I forgot to introduce among the de- 
 lights of a dinner : 
 
 61. The purgatorial interval after you have all dined, and before the 
 servants have taken every thing (particularly themselves) away, and finally 
 shut the door. 
 
 Ned Tes. " Mixtis servitiis,.et dissono clamore." TAG. 
 
 52. Cracking a hard nut with your teeth, and filling the gap left by 
 the grinder you have knocked out, with black bitter dust 
 
 Tes. This is "worse than worst!" more than even the 
 demons themselves are able to bear : 
 
 " they, instead of fruit, 
 
 Chew'd bitter ashes, which th' offended taste 
 With spatt'ring noise rejected." MILT. 
 
 53. When parched with thirst, opening your last bottle of spruce beer, 
 and finding it so very good, that it first washes your face and hands, and 
 then your walls and furniture, with the whole of its contents.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 121 
 
 A preparation sooted to the most fastidious taste. Making a mull of It 
 
 Sen. Nay, the contrary is quite as bad, viz. : 
 
 64. At the instant of drawing the cork, starting back from the eagerly 
 expected burst of froth, but without the least occasion either for your 
 Juices or fears the liquor all remaining in the bottle as quiet as a lamb. 
 
 55. In preparing mulled wine for yourself and friends aftor it has 
 remained the proper time upon the fire, and just as you are taking it off, 
 and all are rousing for the regale seeing an avalanche of soot plump into 
 the pot 
 
 56. While you are swallowing a raspberry, discovering fey its taste that 
 you have been so unhappy as to occasion the death of a harmless insect ! 
 
 67. Your tongue coming in contact with the skin of a peach. 
 
 Sen. Yes, or even the mind coming in contact with the 
 idea! 
 
 68. Your sensations about the throat and chest, after having too 
 hastily forced down a piece of very hard dry biscuit just as if you were 
 swallowing a nutmeg-grater three or four yards long. 
 
 Tes. Well, we have got through with the miseries of 
 eating ; what comes next in order 1 
 
 Sen. The miseries of digesting; in real life. 
 
 Tes. Ha, ha! Very true. But those we must leave to 
 the imagination I'm afraid I ought to say the memory of 
 most people, with all the nauseous drugs the idea suggests. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 May / my capacity ne'er so full fill, O, 
 That I have to sleep on a Hygeian pill-O.
 
 122 THE MISERIES OF Iir.MAX LIFE. 
 
 Miseries domestic. House-cleaning. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Miseries domestic. House-cleaning. Houses were always coaled till the furnaces 
 Hue to the rescue. A lock, no key. A chimney, smoky. A carpet-clawing. 
 A Mister-drawing. Bull Ding a nuisance, alone; and prolific in little Bills, bo- 
 sides. The city most opposed to the introduction of gas. Spermaceti. Trouble 
 
 in a eras-fly shape not to be made light of. Candle miseries. There's no rest for 
 (lie wick-ed. The Augean stables. (Corruption from haw-gee-in' being ox- 
 stables.) The cloning table, (though not the last.) not of contents but of discon- 
 tents. Misfortune's Ayerfatit colors. An over-T-nrn. Dressing-room miseries. 
 The love of dress what an anomaly! Bad habits; the more they are broken, 
 the worse they get Rank ley in the nostrils makes rancor lie in the heart. A 
 brush with the bristles. The raixer of recollections of en -jaw-men ts. Paring and 
 re-parins till repairing is impossible. Pantaloons. A fit not like a glove, but 
 like a convulsion. A crumb not of comfort. The penalty of loaf-ing in bed. 
 A coat changed from a beauty to a b-u-t for ridicule. A leak more tearful even 
 than an onion ! Night-attacks of mosquitoes, &c., that make one regret the old 
 " Knisrhts in armor." Cold weather. Nurses. (Both suggestive of Lap-land.) 
 After all, the worst thing about a bed is getting up. The stamp of ill-breeding. 
 
 1. Getting up early on a cold, gloomy morning, (quite enough already, 
 you'll .say ; but that's not half of it,) Getting up early on a cold, gloomy 
 morning, I Fay, and on running down into the breakfast -room for warmth 
 and comfort, finding chairs, tables, shovel, poker, tongs, and fender, huddled 
 into the middle of the room dust flying in all directions carpet tossed 
 backwards floor newly washed window wide open beeswax, brush, 
 and rubber, in one corner brooms, mops, and pails, in another and a 
 
 dingy maid on her knees, before an empty grate. 
 
 * 
 / 
 
 Tes. There's a set of jewels for our cabinet of miseries ! 
 all of the first water, and in the rightest order for our use ! 
 
 Sen. I had myself intended to open with another of the 
 same species ; but you have struck me dumb. 
 
 Tes. Pho, pho ! let's have it ; when a diamond does not 
 come in the way, we must put up with a pearl.
 
 THE J//.S-AY.VAX OF HUMAN LIFE. 123 
 
 Houses were always conlcd till the furnaces fluo to the rescue. 
 
 Sen. Well, then, if you won't despise me : 
 
 2. Having to pass the maid as she is scouring the stairs to which I 
 intended to add, soring, hearing, or guessing any thing at all of the matter, 
 when washing and drying an; going on in the lumsf ; or, what is worse 
 still, having to duck and flap your way through lines, or rather lanes, of 
 
 clammy clothes, just hung out to dry. 
 
 3. On coming into the room, frost-bitten attempting to stir a very 
 compact fire with a red-hot poker, which, from being worn to a thread 
 towards the bottom, bends double at the slightest touch, without discom- 
 posing a coal. 
 
 Sen. Yes ; or, on the other hand, 
 
 4. Raising them too much, when the grate is overcharged ; and so, 
 notwithstanding all your caution, disposing the live, coals over the carpet, 
 and among the petticoats of the ladies. , 
 
 6. Feeling your arm and elbow cold ; and, on looking farther into the 
 master, perceiving that you have long been leaning in slop, which has 
 dabbled you to the skin. 
 
 juatting plump on an unsuspected and unsuspecting cat in your 
 
 chair. 
 
 7. Visiting at a house long accustomed to a furnace, where the ideas 
 of the inhabitants (as they always do) have risen thermometrically ever 
 since they had coal-fires ; as you have stilL 
 
 8. The vice varsa of the above 
 
 9. At going to bed after having toiled, scorched, and melted yourself, 
 in raking out a large and obstinate fire, which, at last, you seem to have 
 effected ; seeing it, as you turn round at the door, burning and roaring up 
 far more fiercely than ever. 
 
 1 0. In attempting to throw up cinders oversetting and scattering them 
 far and wide, by dashing the edge of the shovel, as if with a violent deter- 
 mination, against the upper bar of the grate.
 
 124 TffE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A lock, no key. A chimney, smoky. A carpet-clawing. A blister-drawinz. 
 
 11. Fumbliug in vain at a rusty, refractory door-lock, of which the 
 hasp flies backwards, and there sticks ; so that you are at last obliged to 
 k-uve the door flapping and whining on its unoiled hinge, and fanning you 
 into an ague your own fury furnishing the fever. 
 
 12. Sitting fur hours before a smoky chimney, like a Hottentot in a 
 kraal ; then, just as your sufferings seem, at last, to be at an end puff, 
 puff ! whiff, whiff ! again, far more furiously than ever. 
 
 13. Waking, stiff and frozen, from a long sleep in your chair by the 
 fireside ; then crouching closer and closer over the miserable embers, for 
 want of courage to go up to bed ; and so, keeping in the co/d to be warm ! 
 -when you go at last, your candle flickers out in the passage, and you 
 are left to grope your way, blundering, and breaking your shins at every 
 sti-j), against the balusters; every stair, too, creaking and groaning under 
 your weight, though you tread as tenderly as possible, for fear of waking 
 the house, consisting chiefly of invalids, whom you feel that you are 
 rousing, one after another, from their dozes, as you pass their several doora. 
 
 14. Elbowing both your candles off the table, and then setting them 
 up in the shape of siphons. 
 
 15. Toiling at a rotten cork with a broken screw, and so dragging it 
 out piecemeal, except the fragments, which drop into the bottle. 
 
 16. Grinding coals or cinders into the carpet, in turning upon your 
 heel; then, after stooping, in a frenzy, to pick up the filthy fragments, and 
 at last walking away satisfied that you have done so ; crushing fresh 
 parcels of them in other parts, and so on. 
 
 Ned Tes. A great injury to your property, and a grater to 
 your feelings. 
 
 17. After taking infinite pains to paste a drawing, or other choice 
 thing, very nicely seeing the paper, with all your pressing and smoothing 
 in one part, start up in a thousand bulbous blisters in other places. 
 
 18. Just as you Lave finished dressing yourself more nicely than
 
 THE WSERIRS OF HV3/A.V LIFE. 125 
 
 Bull Ding a nuisance, alone; and prolific In little Bills, besides. 
 
 usual, to receive company at dinner creeping down into a dark, damp 
 cellar, for wine ; ;tn<l iiiirxpcctcdlv tiii'ling. from a suddeu chill about the 
 li\\vr part of the leg, tliat you are going by water. 
 
 1 9. Losing the keys of all your most private repositories ; by which 
 you suffer a double embarrassment that you cannot, yourself, get at 
 what you want ; and that they have, probably, fallen into the hands of 
 others, who both can and will. 
 
 20. After having ordered from town some articles of dress, furniture, 
 ornament, <tc., to be made on some particular model, which you had most 
 solicitously explained to the workman before you went into the coun- 
 try receiving it, at length, at the moment when it is most wanted, with 
 this only drawback on your satisfaction, that it is so perversely wrong, in 
 all possible respects, as to be absolutely useless 1 
 
 21. Going on with a servant in whose honesty you have strong reasons 
 for suspecting a leak, though not quite strong enough to warrant you in 
 proceeding to a close charge, and search. 
 
 22. Beginning your residence at the country-house to which you have 
 just removed, before the repairs are finished with the comfort of picking 
 your way from one ruined room to another, through fragments of peeled 
 mortar, broken bricks, scattered axes, adzes, chisels, fcc. ; and, at length, 
 being invaded in the fortress of your study, and there pursuing your medi- 
 tations to the sound of hammers, files, saws, tumbling walls, <fea, &c. ; not 
 to mention the manner in which you drag on your domestic existence for 
 a long time, before half the furniture, utensils, <fe&, from your late house, 
 have arrived, to wit : bed-chambers blocked up with matted trunks, 
 bureaus, dec. ; not a curtain or carpet to cover the nakedness of the sitting- 
 rooms, Ac,, <fcc. Then for your eating accommodations dinner dressed 
 by the housemaid, with extempore spits, en attendant the arrival of the 
 bona fide cook, and her apparatus ; every dish, as it is brought in, carrying 
 a "noli me tangere" on the face of it, and, such as it is, being served up on 
 the kitchen table, with a set-out of crockery from the same apartment 
 teaspoons to the suit-cellars, or rather the egg-cups their proxies a man's 
 white knife to a child's green fork, <feo, <fec. ; no alliance as yet formed with 
 the butcher, baker, carrier, <fcc., <Jcc. ; and lastly, when your time, with all
 
 126 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The city most opposed to the introduction of gas. Spermaceti. 
 
 these loads upon it, begins to hang a little heavy upon your hands, neither 
 a clock to strike it, nor a book to kill it ! 
 
 Sen. Why, my dear sir, you seem so much in your ele- 
 ment, while treating this particular head of unhappiness, that 
 
 I feel 
 
 " my genius cow'd, 
 
 As Antony's was by Caesar :" 
 
 however, " nitor in adversum" is a noble motto. To resume, 
 then : 
 
 23. To be startled from a nap in your chair by a dazzling blaze of 
 light, which, on examination, proves to proceed from your candles having 
 been each fluted down on one side by a foot and a half of lobbing wick, 
 which, having first flooded the table, and every thing upon it, in a torrent 
 of sperm, descends in a cataract to the carpet 
 
 Tes. Why, there your candles have outshone mine ; for I 
 was going to say 
 
 24. Reading or writing by one candle, and that so dim, that it would 
 give no light, but for a fresh thief which rises in it every moment, and 
 which perpetually calls yoa from your book, or letter, to poke it off: 
 
 Sen. In doing which you find your paper always ready to 
 receive it. 
 
 25. To find, as is inevitable, on introducing gas into your house, that 
 your quarterly bill is an inscrutable dispensation a mystery into which it 
 is presumptuous to inquire. In the first place, it is about double in 
 amount to your highest calculations. Then, though you determine on a 
 rigid economy in its use, and a reduction in price is advertised, you very 
 probably find the second bill rather larger than the first ! 
 
 26. On being waked up by an overpowering smell of gas, about one 
 or two in the morning: to find that the new servant lias blown out the hall 
 light on going to bed. General headaches next day, of course.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFT. 127 
 
 Trouble in a gas-tly shpe not to be made light of. 
 
 27. Wli.-n you havo a room-full of company, to have your gas, after a 
 premonitory symptom or so, go out unconditionally, leaving you fig\ira- 
 tively iu the dark as to the cause and the remedy, as well as literally as 
 to the fact Either you have put too much water into the meter, or too 
 little. 
 
 28. Attempting to light a taper by a hot fire the farther off you 
 hold it, the longer it takes to light ; the nearer you hold it, the more the 
 coals burn your 'fingers. 
 
 29. Ditto by a lamp chimney, where the paper gets black and smokes 
 furiously, and seems just on the point of ignition, for five mortal minutes. 
 
 80. In default of a screw-driver, laboring with the back, or battering 
 the edge, of a good knife, at a notch infamously wide and shallow ; so that 
 it slips out of its place a hundred times over, without moving the screw 
 a hair's breadth. Likewise 
 
 31. Hammering your own fingers, instead of a very short nail which 
 you furabliugly hold in them said nail, when you do hit it, curling at the 
 point, instead of entering the wall ; or losing its head, so that you cannot 
 extract it : likewise, the head of the hammer violently flying off, so as to 
 break a looking-glass, a friend's skull, <fcc., <fcc. 
 
 Ned Tes. Hitting, if any nail, the thumb nail. 
 
 32. Vainly hunting, a thousand times^ver, in every corner, crook, and 
 cranny of the house, for something you^have lost ; till, at some future 
 period, when you have long abandoned the pursuit, the truant article 
 appears of its own accord. 
 
 Sen. Yes, but not until you have entirely ceased to want 
 it. 
 
 33. Your watch-key having worn itself round; so that it amuses you 
 with spinning, by itself, upon its square pin, of which it was once so fond, 
 as never to think of moving without it 
 
 Ned Tes. Horace, long before the invention of watches,
 
 128 THE MIXERILX OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Candle miseries. There's no rest for the wick-d. 
 
 prophesied this misery very exactly, in his " mutat quadrata 
 rotundis." 
 
 34. Finding, as you rise to take leave of a company, that you have 
 been sitting for an hour, with half the carpet dragged up by the hind legs 
 of your chair ; or, seeing the same crime committed by another, whose 
 awkwardness is far beyond the reach of admonition. 
 
 35. The snuffers scattering their contents over the card-table ; while, 
 in trying to remedy the affliction, you crush the black mischief into the 
 green doth, from which it spreads to the cards, and thence to your fingers, 
 with the rapidity (and almost the fatality) of poison. Likewise 
 
 36. Carrying a flat candlestick in such a manner that the snuffers (not 
 to mention the extinguisher) tilt oflj open in their fall, and scatter then- 
 contents over the carpet. 
 
 Sen. Which, although not a good conductor of heat, is a 
 capital one of any dirt spilt upon it spreading it all over its 
 surface, as if by magic. 
 
 Ned Tes. A car pet ought to be a good conductor. 
 
 37. 'Dropping something, when you are either too lame or too lazy to 
 get up for it ; and almost breaking your ribs, and quite throwing yourself 
 down, by stretching down to it over the arm of your chair, without reach- 
 ing it at last. 
 
 38. The interval between breaking a pane of glass and the arrival of 
 the glazier. N. B. The aspect of the apartment (your constant sitting- 
 room) R N. K, and the wind setting in full from that quarter, at the crisis 
 of the affliction ; glazier a drunkard, living seven miles oft 
 
 39. Pulling at an elastic bell-rope, which you either break from the 
 cramp, without sounding the bell, or tug repeatedly, (thinking that it does 
 not ring, when it does,) so as to bring up a wrong servant 
 
 40. A pair of rusty tongs, which, in opening, stick astnde, so that you 
 cannot manage them witbone hand ; and even \rhen you have forced them
 
 THE MisKlilKS OF HUMAN LIFE. 129 
 
 The Augean stables. (Corruption from haw-gee-in, being ox-otebles.) 
 
 with tin- help of the other, ti/( will not meet at the pinching part, but let 
 slip every coal that is :it all smaller than yur head. Likewise : seeing a 
 good pair doubled and twisted by awkward handling. 
 
 41. Flapping at an expiring fire with an asthmatic pair of bellows. 
 
 42. Scissors that pinch, instead of cutting. 
 
 43. Bottling off liquors and all the stooping, cork-hai^linif, finger- 
 freezing, rim-hammering, bottle-breaking, stocking-slopping, nose-jiouon- 
 \n^, ,Vr., which you have to go through for a whole morning together. 
 
 44. Gruhbin^ in the spoiled key-hole of your locked trunk, or drawer, 
 with the wrong key, which you presently spoil also ; and tliis, when it is 
 of the utmost moment that you should instantly get at the thing wanted ; 
 no blacksmith within many miles. 
 
 45. Being told by your servant, at the beginning of a hard winter, 
 that the coals are almost out ; then, on immediately ordering in a large 
 supply, receiving for answer, that the coals are all locked up in the river 
 by the frost ; but that, as soon as the cold weather is over, you may have 
 any quantity you like ! 
 
 46. A cuplxjard in the parlor in which you are making love with 
 the consequent perpetual intrusion of one prying servant after another, 
 clattering among the shelves with glasses, tea things, &c. ; and all this, just 
 towards the crisis of reciprocal confessions ! 
 
 47. Vainly attempting, when in great haste, to make a very hard lump 
 of sugar melt double tides, by pushing and pressing it against the side of 
 the tumbler; no effect but that of slipping off the spoon with a jerk, and 
 splashing up the hot liquor into your own eyes. 
 
 48. Taking out your pencil on the road to make memoranda, and find- 
 ing that the mineral has effectually eloped from the vegetable part of the 
 instrument 
 
 49. Cleansing the Augean stables ; or, in other words, undertakintr the 
 labor of digesting in its proper place each of a^housand different articles, 
 
 G*
 
 130 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The cloning table, (though not the last,) not of contents but of discontents. 
 
 of as many different uses, sorts, and sizes, (books, phials, paper?, fiddles, 
 mathematical instruments, drawings, and knick-knacks without end,) which 
 heave been for weeks or months accumulating upon the bibles, chairs, and 
 shel ves of your library, and which no servant is able to set to rights; so 
 that you have been, yourself, obliged to await the tardy conjunction of 
 activity and leisure, before you can enter upon the dreary drudgery of 
 subduing them into arrangement. 
 
 50. At dinner dragging the table about the room for an hour, over 
 an uneven floor, in hopes of coaxing it to stand on more than two legs, the 
 remaining two hanging in the air. At length, when you are nearly 
 destroyed already by the failure of all your efforts to persuade the floor 
 and the table to make it up and be friends, suddenly giving yourself the 
 coup de grace, by one fatal straightforward shove, which shuts in the leg 
 on the opposite side, instantly followed by a thunderclap and earthquake, 
 as the leaf drops, together with fruit-plates, sweetmeats, strawberries and 
 cream, (fee., <fec, <fec., leaving you in a state of mind but I forbear ! 
 
 " Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto." 
 Let it suffice to say that 
 
 " Loud was the noise ! aghast was every guest ! 
 The women shriek'd, the men forsook the feast !" DRYD. 
 
 51. Rummaging for half an hour in a disorderly tool-box for a nail or 
 screw, which, wheu you have bruised and soiled your fingers to your 
 taste, you are, at last, obliged to give up as hopeless. 
 
 52. Reposing a fatal confidence in the stability of the fender, by 
 resting your feet upon it with a pressure inwards, as you advance your 
 face towards the fire. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi, 
 Multo non sine risu, 
 Dilapaam in cineres facc-m."
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 131 
 
 Misfortune's dyer -fait colours. An over-T-urn. 
 
 53. Hearing and seeing the operation of shovelling cinders performed 
 by a hardy and indefatigable haiid every scrape upou your ears sensibly 
 stealing uu inch from your span of life. 
 
 64. Attempting to light a candle, with its short wick so effectually 
 crushed down and buried into the body of the tallow, tliat it cannot be set 
 iij) ; while, in stooping it to the flame of another candle, you only keep 
 molting the grease in a stream over the table and carpet ; when you have, 
 at length, caught a precarious glimmer, it is extinguished as soon as you 
 have crept to the door, or (what is worse) to the stairs, " nescius aurae 
 fallacis !" this, three or four times over. At last, to be sure, the wick 
 attains its proper length ; but, fair and softly ! this advantage is purchased 
 at the exorbitant price of seeing the well of sperm overflow its sides, and 
 pour down a bumper into the socket 
 
 55. Haggling the nails of your right hand with a pair of blunt scissors 
 held in the left 
 
 56. Sitting, perforce, on a high, round-bottomed stool, when the chairs 
 are all preoccupied. 
 
 57. Discovering, as you sit down to cards with a strange party, that 
 your hands, from having worn for the first time a pair of black gloves, are 
 as dingy as a dyer's. 
 
 58. The handle of a full tea-cup coming off in your hand, as you are 
 raising it to your mouth. 
 
 Tes. The handle of a tea-cup ! what's that ? 
 
 59. The handle of the tea-wrw coming off in the servant's hand, as he 
 is passing by you ! and this in such a manner, that though you break its 
 fall with your leg, you, at the same time, break your leg with its fall to 
 say notliing of the contents, which, in my own case, I did not find of a 
 very healing nature ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Why, as to oversetting the urn, father, 
 
 Versatur Urna, serius, ocyus,"
 
 132 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LLL'K. 
 
 Dressing-room miseries. The love of dress what an anomaly! 
 
 you know. But the poor servant must feel as if he had urned 
 his bread and butter i. e., buried his only chance of getting 
 a living. 
 
 60. The waking up, on a sultry summer afternoon, having perversely 
 lain down, though you knew how uncomfortable your imp would leave 
 you ! After repeatedly refusing to wake, because the returning conscious- 
 ness was of too wretched discomfort, the point comes when you can delude 
 yourself no longer. Your first feeling is as if your collar had been taken 
 off, dipped in warm water, and stuffed back again in wrinkles under your 
 cravat, which itself has been transformed into a steam heating-pipe* to 
 keep up the temperature of the wet rag. Your pillow has no cold spot 
 in it, and your eyelids feel as if they were made of cotton batting. To 
 crown all, you have an indistinct idea of having heard the tea-bell some 
 time before, and it is too dark to tell the wash-stand from the towel-rack. 
 
 61. Endeavoring, with a brush, to coax up dust, cinders, and other 
 abominables, from a low hearth, against a suddenly-rising ridge, which 
 constantly keeps returning them upon your hands. 
 
 62. The machinery of the window-sash abruptly striking work, in 
 consequence of the flat refusal of all its parts to act in concert any longer ; 
 the leads skulking down in their holes, far below all sight and reach the 
 pullies resolutely standing out against all your efforts to turn them the 
 cords preternaturally bowing and courtesying out of their destined perpen- 
 dicular and the sash itself, instead of cheerfully and obsequiously waiting, 
 as usual, for your guidance, now rudely and furiously slapping down, with- 
 out a moment's warning, with the force (if not the effect) of a guillotine ; 
 while, with all your lifting and lowering, and twitching and wheedling, 
 you prove totally unable to compose the unhappy feuds which have thus 
 suddenly and unaccountably broken out amongst the mechanical powers I 
 
 63. After putting on your clean shirt, rinding that the two bottom 
 buttons of the collar have absconded; or, that they have been ironed into 
 two or three bits of straggling ivory : no time to change. 
 
 64. A coat tight and short in the sleeves.
 
 TltK MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 133 
 
 Bad haliit* ; the more they are broken, the worse they got. 
 
 65. Or paiitsiloons decidedly too long suspenders stretched over your 
 back like shoulder-braces. 
 
 66. Shaving after a frosty walk, (when the face is pimpled, skin tender, 
 and luuid tremulous,) with cold pump-water, hard brush, ropy soap, and a 
 blunt razor. Likewise, shaving with a blister behind each of your ears. 
 
 67. Repeatedly hitching and breaking the teeth of a fine-toothed 
 comb in the same tender place, the feelings of which you had already 
 exasperated by trying to appease the itching with your naiL 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Jamque eadem digitis, jam pectine pulsat eburno." VIEO. 
 
 68. After having dropped out your sleeve-button, without knowing it, 
 rashly thrusting your hand into the arm of your coat, and so carrying the 
 shirt-sleeve in a bunch up to the shoulder, leaving your arm raw, cold, and 
 bare. 
 
 69. While you are waiting for a fresh supply of tooth-brushes 
 battering your teeth with the ivory, and pricking your gums with the 
 bristles of your old one, completely grubbed out in the middle ; its few 
 remaining hairs starting off horizontally on all sides. 
 
 Tes. Let me finish your picture with a touch of horror 
 that shall petrify the beholder : 
 
 70. The moment in which a misgiving comes over you, that a servant 
 has clandestinely assisted you in wearing it out ! 
 
 71. After sweltering for an hour, on a hot day, in an attempt to drag 
 on a new and tight boot, being unable to get it on, for want of size ; or off, 
 for want of a boot-jack. 
 
 72. Tn hastily putting on your shirt, (people waiting for you at dinner,) 
 stripping it in two; no other clean. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 " qua se medio trudunt tenues rumpunt tunicas." VIEG. GEORO.
 
 134 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Bank Icy in the nostrils makes rancor lie in the heart. 
 
 73. Vilely washed, and as vilely ironed linen, which you would not 
 believe to have been in the tub but for the reeking evidence of rank soap 
 or ley, by which your nose is satisfied of the fact. 
 
 74. Misbuttoning your waistcoat, (undiscovered till you have gone 
 into company,) so that the bottom button seems sent to Coventry by the 
 rest. 
 
 76. Tying your neckcloth vilely, when you wish to be particularly 
 seducing, (always the case !) and only making the matter worse the longer 
 you fumble at it. 
 
 76. On leaving the house, finding that you have lost one glove, and 
 falsely hoping that you shall be less miserable by wearing the other single, 
 than by going altogether bare-handed. 
 
 77. The involuntary mortification of wearing a hair shirt, in conse- 
 quence of having inconsiderately been cropped after shifting. 
 
 78. In attempting to untie the strings of your drawers at going to bed 
 very sleepy, dragging them into a cluster of hard knots, with your subse- 
 quent frenzy of nipping and picking at them for an hour, till your nails are 
 sore ; no knife. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Ille simul manibus tendit divellere nodos 
 Clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit !" VIEG. 
 
 79. Slipping your sleeve-button through a large button-hole; or 
 wedging it in a small one. 
 
 Sen Yes; or making ample room for your button, by 
 breaking fairly through the hole at the weak end. 
 
 80. In dressing to dine out your last shoe-string breaking, the wrong 
 coat brushed, hole found in your stocking after you are dressed, <tc., <fec. ; 
 all this, and much more, invariably coming upon you like hail, at the 
 moment when you are most belated.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFK. 135 
 
 A brush with the bristles. Tho raiser of recollections of en-jaw-ments. 
 
 81. After having broken the ice in your basin, to wash your hands 
 dangling them before you like a dancing bear, while you ferret about in 
 vain for a towel. 
 
 82. In cleaning your teeth numerous holes full of bristles falling out 
 at once, and clogging your jaws and throat, till you are choked ; then, in 
 endeavoring to pick away with your fingers what you cannot rinse out, 
 getting hold of only one bristle at a time : 
 
 -" pilos 
 
 Paulatim vello ; et demo unum, demo et item unum, 
 elusus ratione ruentis acervi !" Hon. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " Quid te exempta juvat spinis de pluribus una ?" Hoa. 
 
 83. In shaving at the first onset, saluting your chin with a deep 
 gash ; so that, through the remainder of the operation, your face and 
 fingers are " dabbled in blood," which enrages you by flowing faster than 
 you can wash it away ; " fluidum lavit inde cruorem Dentibus infrendens 
 gemitu I" When you have, at length, done with the razor the new 
 delays, (which you have to encounter, in an agony of haste,) by apply- 
 ing one impotent styptic after another; and, to conclude, when, after 
 endless attempts, you seem to have finally dammed the flood, and, in that 
 persuasion; have finished your dress, and are just leaving your chamber 
 " eloquar, an sileam ?" seeing it burst out afresh on your clean neckcloth 1 
 
 84. Trying to lather your face with a brush like a wool-card, that 
 excoriates your cheek, so as to make it a torture like self-immolation to 
 get up a lather. Or, 
 
 85. With one so soft, and weak, and imbecile, that it makes itself into 
 two ropes, and straddles your chin. 
 
 86. After having patiently and thoroughly stropped your razor, to 
 drop it on the marble table edge foremost, of course. 
 
 Tes. There is a song Mrs. Testy used to sing for me
 
 136 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Paring and re-paring till repairing is impossible. 
 
 before she was so called, that exemplifies the proclivity of all 
 bodies toward falling on the wrong side. I probably do riot 
 remember the exact words, but it was something like this : 
 
 " I never had a dear gazelle, 
 
 Particularly long and wide, 
 But when it came to know me well, 
 And always on the buttered side !" 
 
 Ned Tes. How you do murder things, father ! There 
 were two songs, one of which was a parody on the other : 
 
 " I never had a dear gazelle, 
 
 To glad me with its soft black eye, 
 But when it came to know me well, 
 And love me it was sure to die." 
 
 The parody is like unto it : 
 
 * I never had a piece of bread, 
 Particularly long and wide, 
 But fell upon the sanded floor, 
 
 And always on the buttered side !" 
 
 Tes. No matter, sir. Both are appropriate, and mine 
 combined the beauties of both the beauties of both, sir ! 
 
 87. After a long, patient, skillful, cautious, paring at a painful corn 
 when you have got it down to the lowest state of attenuation, to try one 
 foolish slice too much, and start the blood, which stops not during the 
 whole day, but alternately soaks and hardens on your stocking, till it 
 forms a plaster, that sticks like grim death when you want to unboot at 
 night 
 
 88. A fob so much too small for your watch, that, in impatiently 
 tugging out the latter, you either turn the lining inside outwards, or bring 
 away the chain by itself.
 
 THE MIXKItlES OF HUMAN LIFE. 137 
 
 Pantaloons. A fit not like glove, but like a convulsion. 
 
 89. In dressing for dinner your last clean shirt, when you have put 
 it on, proving so dangerously damp, that, to save your life, (and what 
 weaker motive would bring you to do it ?) you throw it off, and put ou the 
 cast garmeut, in cold blood. 
 
 Ned Tes. It is easy to say " What must be mussed," and 
 perhaps your shirt-bosoms come in that category. 
 
 90. Loudly bursting three or four buttons of your tight waistcoat, the 
 fastenings of your braces, or the strings of your pantaloons behind, in 
 fetching a deep sigh ! dead silence in the company at the moment of the 
 melancholy explosion. 
 
 91. The two side-screws of your dressing-glass losing their power, 
 (which happens in about a week after it has come home,) so that, with all 
 your twisting and twirling, you can never persuade it to remain upright ; 
 but, as you sit before it, it will keep swinging and flapping upon your 
 
 92. Pushing up your shirt-sleeves for the purpose of washing your 
 hands, but so ineffectually, that in the midst of the operation, they fall and 
 bag down over your wet, soapy wrists. 
 
 93. When dressing in violent haste your braces becoming suddenly 
 so entangled, that, after fruitlessly turning and winding them for half an 
 hour in every possible direction, till you are raving mad, you are, at last, 
 obliged to fasten them as you can, with the buckles inside outwards 
 straps twisted into hard knots, and girding and cutting your back and 
 shoulders like spliced cords, &c. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 ' centum vinctus aheuis 
 
 Post tergurn nodis, fremit horridus ore cruento P Viao. 
 
 94. Putting on a waistcoat which you find (too late) has lostrfts strings 
 behind, so that it would take in all your family ; and consequently, when 
 you button in your coat, the bottom of the waistcoat struts out like a tent
 
 138 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A crumb not of comfort The penalty of loaf-ing in bed. 
 
 95. Using a nail-brusb that -would serve for a wool-card its bristles 
 being in knots an incb apart, so that only two or three prickles at a time 
 find their way under your nails, which they rake to the quick, without 
 disturbing a particle of the contents. 
 
 96. Entering your watch at the wrong opening, when it instantly 
 dives to your knee or your boot, where, for want of a lucky opportunity to 
 extricate it, you continue to wear it 
 
 Sen. A mere trifle, Mr. Testy ; hear m.e : 
 
 97. Eating a biscuit so unguardedly, that the crumbs, or rather crust- 
 ula, keep showering into your bosom ; while, from the cause you have just 
 mentioned, you are under the necessity of cherishing them next your skin, 
 for the rest of the day and a poor day of it you have ! Apropos of 
 which, likewise 
 
 98. After having breakfasted in bed, to which you are confined 
 rolh'ng, through the rest of the day and night, in crumbs, which are pres- 
 ently baked by your body into innumerable needles of crust 
 
 99. The feelings of your teeth and gum?, when you have insulted 
 them by an over-proportion of vitriol in a tooth-powder. 
 
 100. In lathering the face, before shaving, very early in the morning, 
 while still half asleep gaping so suddenly as to slap the full brush into 
 your mouth ! So much for the benefits of early rising 1 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 u The man that's fond, precociously, of stirring, must be a spoon 1" HOOD. 
 
 101. The sudden necessity of going to a shoemaker's shop, on the des- 
 perate enterprise of trying to suit yourself, extempore, with a pair of 
 In xits; then, after dragging on and off his whole stock in trade, without 
 once approaching to the mark, being fated to shuffle, or hobble away, at 
 hist, in a pair which you seem to have stolen.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 139 
 
 A coat changed from a beauty to a b-u-t for ridicule. 
 
 1U2. After rising, iu a bitter frost, and going up to the washing-stand 
 water frozen to the centre ; to have to .-tun. 1, in an ague, first till you 
 have raised a torpid servant, then while the pump is thawed, <Su\ 
 
 EXPLORING EXPEDITION TO THE FROZEN REGIONS Kane's Report. 
 
 Ned Tes. (Sufferer loq.) "Ewer like an iceberg! At least 
 you're not at all like a. flow. 
 
 103. Seeing the beauty of your coat, whilst yet iu its prime, daily 
 yielding to those confounded spots which come, you know not how nor 
 when, an d which no degree of care can prevent from multiplying without 
 mercy, till it is disfigured beyond all hope of recovery. 
 
 -" non ego paucis 
 
 Offendar maculis ;" 
 
 but to see them spread by dozens in a day there is no 
 enduring it ! look here, for instance and here and here 
 Sen. Nay, Mr. Testy, this misery may be removed by 
 sending your coat to the scourer.
 
 140 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A lent more tearful even than an onion ! 
 
 Tes. I must, I must ; [then, rubbing it here and there 
 with his sleeve] "Out, danm'd spot! out, I say ! one! 
 two ! why then 'tis time to do 't !" High time, indeed : 
 yes I will send it to the scourer's. 
 
 104. Dressing for a ball by an ill-oast looking-glass, (not knowing it to 
 be so at the time,) and so mourning over your own unseasonable ugliness. 
 
 105. Sleeping in an ill-roofed attic story, while torrents of rain are 
 falling all night the leaky ceiling refreshing you as you lie, with a shower 
 bath, filtered through the tester of your bed : 
 
 " Quain juvat somnos, imbre juvante, sequi !" 
 
 Then, on rising, quite braced, in the morning, finding your stockings, neck- 
 cloth, <fec., afloat. 
 
 106. "Waking in the middle of the night, in a state of raging thirst; 
 eagerly blundering in the dark to the washing-stand ; and there, after 
 preparing, with a firm grasp, to raise a large full water-decanter to your 
 mouth finding it fly up in your band, as light as emptiness can make it I 
 
 Sen. Yes; or, on the contrary, 
 
 10*7. Finding the broad-mouthed pitcher, which you lift to your lips on 
 the same occasion, so full, that, besides amply satisfying your thirst, it, at 
 the same time, keeps cooling your heated body, and purifying your linen, 
 with the overplus ! 
 
 108. The twofold torment inflicted by a flea viz., first, the persecution 
 to which he subjects you through the night ; secondly, the loss of your 
 meditated revenge in the morning, by his hocuspocus escapes his un- 
 thought-of and incredible capers, leaps, and flings, from under your eager 
 fingers, at the very instant when you seem in the act of nay, to have 
 actually annihilated him. 
 
 " Mille fugit refugitque vias ; at vividus" alter 
 " Haeret hians; jam, jamque tenet, similisque tenenti 
 Tnrrpnnit, morsn elusus !" VIRG. 
 
 Increpuit morsu elusus !" VIKO.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 141 
 
 Night-attacks of mosquitoes, Ac., that make one regret the old " Knights in armor." 
 
 Sen. O, yes ! I am quite at home in this misery ; 
 " intus et in cute novi." This little harlequin of the insect 
 race seems, like his brother the biped, to consider his pur- 
 suers as foes " quos fallere et effugere est triumphus." 
 
 109. Getting out of bed in the morning, after having had far too much 
 
 Tes. To which I beg leave to " move as an amendment," 
 or far too little. 
 
 110. After tossing through a restless night, in sickness, sinking at last 
 into a doze, from which you instantly start broad awake, with the joy of 
 thinking that you are falling asleep. 
 
 111. At a strange house jumping into a bed which you expect, and 
 have desired, may be very hard ; and instantly finding yourself buried in 
 a valley of pap, between two mountains of feathers ; the night a dog 
 night 
 
 112. Scylla, or Charybdis sleeping in damp sheets, or between the 
 blankets. 
 
 113. The hypochondriacal impression, under which you fancy, as you 
 lie in bed, that your fingers are each as large as a woolsack legs of the 
 size of church pillars pillow bigger than the bed of Ware, <fc<x, Ac. ; and 
 all this aSair seeming to grow worse and worse every moment J 
 
 Tes. A plaguy instance of Virgil's " Majorque videri !" I 
 must own. 
 
 114. To be startled from your slumbers, all night long, by your win 
 dows, as they bang and thump, by fits, in the wind ; the floors and wains- 
 cot of your chamber, too, occasionally stretching and cracking like a ship, 
 Ac., <tc. ; till, at last, if you have any nerves, you go mad. 
 
 115. The shrill, tiny buzz, or whizz, of mosquitoes about your eyes, 
 nose, and ears, through a sultry night
 
 142 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Cold weather. Nurses. (Botli suggestive of Lap-land.) 
 
 116. Finding that you have far, very far very far indeed from 
 fin >ngh bed-clothes, as you get into bed, in a brandy-freezing night; 
 housemaids all asleep hours ago. 
 
 117. Being driven from one comer of the bed to another by the sharp 
 punts of feathers, which stand up to receive you, on whichever side you 
 turn. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 u Omne tulit punctum T HOE. 
 Sen. 
 
 " Restless he toss'd and tumbled, to and fro, 
 And roll'd, and wriggled farther off, for woe !" 
 
 DBYD. WIFE OF BATH. 
 
 118. Waking with the pain of finding that you are doing your best to 
 bite your own tongue off. 
 
 119. The sheet untucked, or too short, so as to bring the legs into 
 close intimacy with the blanket 
 
 1 20. While you are confined to your bed by sickness the humors of 
 a hired nurse ; who, among other attractions, likes " a drop of comfort" 
 leaves your door wide open stamps about the chamber like a horse in a 
 boat slops you, as you lie, with scalding possets attacks the fire, instead 
 of courting it falls asleep the moment before you want her, and then 
 snores you down when you call to her wakes you at the wrong hour to 
 take your physic, and then gives you a dose of aquafortis for a composing 
 draught ! <fcc.. Ac., <fcc. 
 
 121. The flame (but not the smell) of your candle going out, as you 
 lie sick and sleepless ; leaving you, at once, 
 
 " Pertaesum thalami, ttedaeque." Vrao. 
 
 122. Suddenly recollecting, as you lie at a very late hour of a Lapland 
 night, that you have neglected to see, as usual, that the fires are all safe 
 below ; then, after an agonizing interval of hesitation, crawling out, like a 
 culprit, and quivering down stairs.
 
 THE .)//>' A'/.'/A-.V OF HUMAN LIFE. 143 
 
 After all, the wont thing about a bed Is getting up. 
 
 Tes. This happened to me last night. O, it was a snug 
 job, to be sure ! as to myself, I had no scruple in determining 
 that it would have been a world pleasanter, in such a night as 
 that, to be burnt, than frozen, to death; but as Madam, there, 
 seemed to think she had a sort of joint interest in the ques- 
 tion, and was not altogether satisfied with my way of deciding 
 it; why, I e'en gave myself up to my 'fate. 
 
 Sen. These dressing-room and bedchamber miseries make 
 terrible inroads on one's domestic peace and quu-tm^*. 
 What would you say, Testy, to a valet a private servant? 
 
 Tts. "I shall have no further occasion for your services," 
 is what I should probably say to him, (translated into polite 
 language,) at the end of the first day-and-a-half, or shorter 
 time ; whenever my patience was exhausted. A " gentleman's 
 gentleman," indeed ! I'd as soon think of hiring a private 
 drummer to contribute to my peace and quietness ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Or a private toot-er, to play on the fife for you, 
 and so add to.the harmony of your domestic arrangements. 
 
 Sen. To be sure ; we have said almost too much about the 
 servant nuisance already, to allow the idea that an addition 
 to their number could be an alleviation to any misery in the 
 world. 
 
 Tes. Besides, the nearer they are the more intolerable. 
 As for a body-servant, no one bodily ailment could be com- 
 pared with it. 
 
 Ned Tes. Or, as an Englishman might say, it takes two 
 'ills to make a valet. 
 
 Sen. Well, what shall we attack next time 1 
 
 Tes. We shall come to some " slough of despond," you 
 may be sure some ever-open trap-door, to fall through to 
 the realms below. 
 
 Xed Tes. To pilch into Tar-tar-us.
 
 144 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The stamp of ill-breeding. 
 
 Tes. Some patch of blackness is always to be had without 
 searching for it ; and, what's more, lots of people to defend it 
 as a beauty-spot. 
 
 Ned Tes. We need not scour the earth to find its stains. 
 
 Tes. No, indeed. We may leave it to chance, and still 
 be at no loss to continue 
 
 THE MARTYR LEG-END.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN Llb'K. ]45 
 
 Miseries of the body. (Every one no the blows It is subject to.) 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 M i-rries of the body. (Every one noe the blows it is subject to.) Ad udfortudato 
 bad who cad ilot prodoudce eb or ed. If you've studied your nerves, you've 
 tuugltt yoM/--self self-torture. Amateur doctors of a mature age too. The game 
 of draught*. Checkers of perspiration. Setter let the ladles alone or you'll 
 surely lose! Men's best aim} are found to be wi*, women's to be Mrs. Are 
 man-tiilas machines for the cultivation of the race ? Harrowing thought ! Hap- 
 piness destroyed by an evil apell. Modern sociability. Oh Pride, tliou httl-pett 
 to make mankind wretched. A carriage is like a lottery prize : never driticn- when 
 one wants it. A dis-tressed damsel. The meshes ladies weave are sometimes 
 labor lost. Part4e of pleasure well named. The pleasure isn't in the meeting. 
 Compassionable ugliness. (The consequences of the small pox are to lie pitted.) 
 Motes are not defensible In eye-warfare. Beams can overcome them. 
 
 1. A villainous cold in the head blowing your nose lustily and 
 frequently, till you are a walking nuisance to all around you, but without 
 any fruits, except a sharp twinging sensation in the nostrils, as the pas- 
 sages which you have forced open, close up again with a shrill, thin, 
 whining whistle ; not to mention the necessity of disgusting yourself and 
 friends by pronounijng M like B, and N like D, till you are well 
 
 Sen. Bad enough ; but I have a worse, just now coming 
 upon me : 
 
 2. Being on the bri on the bri on the bri on the br (sneezes) 
 ink of a sneeze for a quarter of an hour together ; and yet, with all your 
 gasping and sobbing, never able to compass it 
 
 3. After over fatigue or watching those self-invited starts, jerks, or 
 twitches, that fly about the limbs and body, and come on with an inde- 
 scribable kind of tingling, teazing, gnawing restlessness ; more especially 
 towards bed-time. 
 
 7
 
 146 THE .W.VA'A'/F.V OF 1 1C MAN LIFE. 
 
 \i\ wlfortiifliiU 1 bad who cail <lot prodoudce tbor ed. 
 
 4. ] Sending bark the finger-nail, or even thinking of it. 
 
 5. The sensation, from the hip downwards, when your foot is fast 
 asleep, and before the sharp-shooting, which you have next to expect, has 
 yet come on. 
 
 6. Dreaming that you have a locked jaw, and seeming to wrench open 
 your own head, in your convulsive efforts to speak or gape. 
 
 7. A. dozen or two of hiccoughs in the same breath. 
 
 8. In your sick chamber receiving a large parcel, which you expect 
 to contain interesting books, or dainties sent for your comfort by some kind 
 friend ; and, on eagerly opening it, finding only a myriad of fresh phials, 
 and packets of medicines ; and this, too, when you thought you had done 
 with the doctor. 
 
 9. Pravo vivere naso; i. e., a deep notch cut by an east wind under 
 each nostril, and wliich you tear open afresh, every time you blow your 
 
 nose. 
 
 Sen. Also (and this is a pleasure I have soon to expect) 
 
 10. The state of your mouth at the winding up of a tremendous cold 
 your lips being metamorphosed into two boiling barrels, totally disqualified 
 for the functions of eating, speaking, laughing, gaping, whistling, and 
 kissing. 
 
 Sen. In short, what gives all these rheuiuic distresses, 
 besides a hundred more 
 
 11. A five-days' north-east wind. 
 
 Ned Ten. Until all with one voice (who have any voice) 
 
 cry : 
 
 Cease, rude Boreas, blustridg railer, 
 
 Li*t, ye laddsbed, all to be ; 
 Sailors, hear a brother sailor 
 
 Sidg the dadgers of the c-(old). 
 
 Ode's dose is a bcrc batter of fbrb, by that tibe.
 
 TllK .)//>/.' /AX OF in i MAX LIFK. 147 
 
 If you've stii'li.vl yonr nervp*, yo-i'v.- tmujfit >/mtr-te\t ftHt-torture. 
 
 12. To have vour blood nm cold, as tlic Having is, for that peculiar 
 sensation of shivering chill that we all experience ; some for one sound, and 
 some for another. Ono man I know will trot away lustily at hearing 
 any one crack his finder-joints. Another would as soon die by the rack iis 
 crunch a piece of loaf-sugar in his mouth. As for me, a child writing on a 
 slate is torture; and to see, or ever to think 01, a spade driven into wet 
 gravel sets the chills going between my shoulders, whence I can watch 
 them travel downward over the top of my knees, leaving a track of irri- 
 tated pores that children call "goose-flesh," standing up like the bristles on 
 the back of an angry hog. 
 
 13. Suddenly and violently scratching your ear, without recollecting 
 to respect the feelings of an excruciating pimple, with which it is infested. 
 
 Sen. Yes, the " vcllit aurcm," without the " admonuit," is 
 a sad mistake, indeed ! 
 
 1 4. Battering your own knuckles, or jarring the touchy part of your 
 elbow against the edge of the table, as if with a hearty good will. 
 
 15. After having, with great labor, succeeded in dragging on a new 
 
 and very ti^ht boot receiving strong and incessant hints from a hornet at 
 the bottom, that he does not like his confinement ; no boot-jack at hand to 
 second your anxiety to relieve him, and the poor prisoner still jerking 
 
 away ! 
 
 16. On standing up, and stretching yourself, after- sitting long over 
 books or papers the sudden rush of blood to the head, and consequent 
 giddiness and staggering, with which you are punished for your sober 
 excess. * 
 
 17. The ends of your finger-nails becoming rough and ragged, so as to 
 catch and pull away the wool or threads of worsted, cotton, etc. 
 
 18. After long reclining, with evciy limb disposed in some peculiarly 
 luxurious manner to be suddenly routed from your lounge! Then, en- 
 deavoring in vain to re-establish yourself in your former pisture, of which 
 you have forgotten the particulars, though you recollect the enjoyment,
 
 148 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Amateur doctors of a mature age too. 
 
 every new attempt leaving a certain void iu your comfort, which nothing 
 can supply : 
 
 " in ev'ry varied posture, 
 
 How widow*d ev'ry thought of every joy !" YOTTNG. 
 
 19. Trying in vain to tamper with an approaching fit of the cramp, by 
 stretching out your limbs and lying as still as a mouse. 
 
 20. In sickness the tender persecution you undergo from your female 
 fri ft ids, while, after a restless night, you are beginning, towards the evening 
 of the following day, to drop into a delicious doze in your chair ; but 
 which they will, on no account, suffer you to enjoy, settling it with each 
 other that you are to be carefully shaken, and well tormented, every half- 
 minute : one crying, " Don't go to sleep !" another, " You had better go to 
 bed !" a third, " You'll certainly take cold 1" a fourth, " You'll spoil your 
 rest at night !" <fec., <fec. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 -" alterius sic 
 
 Altera poscit opem, et conjurat amice." HOE. 
 
 Tes. In the country, and under the direction of a pocket 
 medicine-chest 
 
 21. Laboring in vain to disentangle your medicine scales, till, after 
 fretting, twisting and twirling, for half the morning, to no purpose, you 
 are, at last, obliged to weigh your dose (Tartar Emetic or James' Powders) 
 as you can, with all the strings in a Gordiau knot ; one scale topsyturvy, 
 
 and the other turvytopsy, <fec. 
 
 % 
 
 Sen. Yes ; and this when 
 
 " If thou tak'st more or less, be it but so much 
 As makes it light, or heavy, in the substance, 
 Or the division of the twentieth part 
 Of one poor scruple nay, if the scale turn 
 But in the estimation of a hair, 
 Thou diest!" MERCFI. OF VE.V.
 
 THE ATfSKKfKX OF HUMAN LIFE. 149 
 
 The game of draughts. Checkers of perspiration. 
 
 22. The interval between the dentist's confession that your tooth will 
 be very difficult to draw, and the commencement of the attempt 
 
 23. Groping and stirring with a needle after a thorn in your finger, in 
 hopes of wheedling out the peeping black atom ; which, however, proves 
 too cunning at last for you, and your needle to help you. 
 
 24. In a fireside circle sitting with your head close to a gaping 
 cranny, which keeps up a steady whisper full in your ear the whole even- 
 ing long ; u whisper, however, from which you, at least, leam something 
 the nature of the ear-ache 1 
 
 25. Rashly confessing that you have a slight cold, in the hearing of 
 certain elderly ladies of the faculty, who instantly form themselves into a 
 consultation upon your case, and assail you with a volley of nostrums, all 
 of which, if you would have a moment's peace, you must solemnly prom- 
 ise to take off before night though well satisfied that they would 
 retaliate, by takiny you off before morning. 
 
 26. When in the gout receiving the ruinous salutation of a muscular 
 friend, (a sea captain,) who, seizing your hand in the first transports of a 
 sudden meeting, affectionately crumbles your chalky knuckles with the 
 gripe of a grappling iron ; and then, further confirms his regard for you by 
 greeting your tenderest toe with the stamp of a charger. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 -" recepto 
 
 Dulce mihi furere est amico !" HOE. 
 27. The buzz of a struggling insect who has limed himself in your ear. 
 
 Sen. A disagreeable intrusion, without dispute ; but I 
 should think that the insect you formerly mentioned, which 
 domiciliated itself in your eye, must have enraged you still 
 more. 
 
 Ned Tes. Yes: 
 
 " Segnids irritant animos demissa per aures, 
 Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta." Hoa.
 
 150 THE MISERIES OF lll'UAX LIFE. 
 
 Setter let the ladles alone or you'll snrely lose ! 
 
 Tes. Well, well ; you and Horace may settle that diffi- 
 culty between you, for I cannot ; though it is noi for want of 
 pretty good experience in both ; for I seldom pass a day 
 without an opportunity of comparing notes between the two; 
 one would think I was all over eyes and ears, like Virgil's 
 Fame. But, come, have you any more ready misery in 
 pocket? For my part, I find that, for the present, my 
 memory is out. 
 
 Sen. I warrant you that Mrs. Testy, if she were here, 
 could read us off a pretty list of feminine miseries ; one that 
 would put many of ours to shame. 
 
 Tes. Pshaw ! What do women know of the woes of 
 men, except their name ? 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) He does not mean a pun on the name 
 of wo-men. 
 
 Sen. In fact, she told me the other day that she was going 
 to put down something of the sort. 
 
 Tes. Then I'll bet you half-a-crown she has not done it ! 
 
 Sen. Done! 
 
 Tes. Ned, go and find your mother. 
 
 [Enter MRS. TESTF. 
 
 Mrs. Tes. There, sir. I have put down the miseries, and 
 I'm particularly glad of it, because you are so nicely put 
 down at the same time, and richly deserve it for your slur on 
 the sex! 
 
 Sen. However, I bet on a certainty, which is against all 
 the laws of sporting, so we will consider it a drawn bet, if 
 you please, and proceed to the reading. 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 \ 
 
 " Let old Timotkeus yield the prize, 
 Or both divide the crown"
 
 THE J/y.vAV.'/.IN at' //A'J/.KV LIFE. i:>] 
 
 i-nV hrst uinis are found to be minuet, women's to bo Mrs. 
 
 Tes. Well, well, take it, then; and I give you joy of your 
 sorrow : you nuiy now sing, with old Burton, 
 
 " Naught so sweet as melancholy P 
 
 And so now, Mrs. Testy, for your miseries, if you please ; 
 and let us hear 
 
 -" furcns quid foemina possit." 
 
 Mrs. Tes. Yes, I can 
 
 " answer thee in sighs 
 With all thy woes, and count out tear for tear." 
 
 You must take them as they come, gentlemen ; for I had not 
 time to throw them into any order. 
 
 28. After having invited a friend (who has things very nicely at home) 
 to come and try some of your waffles, or your tea-biscuit, or something of 
 that wrt ; to have them come on the tea-table greatly inferior to the worst 
 former experience. 
 
 29. Having invited company socially for the evening, to have the re- 
 freshments arrive with some paltry excuses, just as the last guest is leaving 
 the door. 
 
 30. To discover, at a dinner-party, that your terrapin soup twangs 
 more decidedly of turpentine soap than can be accounted for in any other 
 way than that yesterday was waishing-day. 
 
 31. At your first meal, on the first day of your housekeeping, to be 
 startled by a fearful crash of glass and china, that admonishes you of the 
 mutability of human affairs in general, and the evanescent nature of your 
 elegant set of china in particular. 
 
 Ned Tes. While you breakfast, the plates break faster ; 
 or a din coming up the kitchen stairs that suggests a dinner 
 tumbling down them.
 
 152 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Are i nun -t i 1 Ins machines for the cultivation of the race ? Harrowing thought I 
 
 32. To Lave a handsome lamp dropped on a handsome carpet, when 
 it is hard to say which destruction is most complete. 
 
 83. To sit for two hours, entirely dressed, waiting for a carriage, in 
 which you were to call for a friend. 
 
 34. Taking the opportunity to call on a tedious acquaintance, when 
 you are sure, from having not long before passed her in the street, that 
 you will have the felicity of leaving a card ; to find that she has just 
 returned, and is so happy not to have missed you 1 
 
 Ned Tea. Your Me Inations, as Yellowplush would say, 
 brought to naught. 
 
 35. Being comfortably settled for a quiet domestic evening, during 
 which one of the family is to read the hist number of Dickens' new novel, 
 to be invaded by a prosy bore, who is full of self-gratulation at having 
 found you at home having come on a rainy evening on purpose, <fec. ; to 
 all which you feel obliged to respond cordially, though hating yourself for 
 your duplicity. 
 
 36. On sitting down to sing to find the piano so very much out of 
 tune that you are continually thinking you are playing false, which opinion 
 your audience shares with you, without finding out that they are mis- 
 taken. 
 
 37. While engaged in an animated conversation, to arrive suddenly at 
 the unavoidable conclusion that your hair is coming down, and that it will 
 arrange itself down your back d la tragedy queen on the slightest move- 
 ment 
 
 38. To be obliged to make an ignominious retreat from a promenade, 
 to repair damages sustained by your lace dress from some intruding foot. 
 
 > 
 
 39. While congratulating yourself on the possession of a new-fashioned 
 mantilla, just received from Paris, to have it borrowed by some tasteless 
 creature for a pattern ; to be reproduced, you are sure, in some hideous 
 color and fabric.
 
 TV/A' MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 153 
 
 Happiness destroyed by an evil upell. 
 
 40. To sleep through a serenade, and to hear it discussed by others 
 with the reflection that you had a bouquet in the parlor, with which you 
 would have been delighted to have rewarded the performers. 
 
 41. To receive a letter from a friend in the country, full of commissions 
 of so precise and exacting a nature, that you know it will take you all 
 over the city, and several days, to give even moderate dissatisfaction. 
 
 Ned Tes. Your friend is, of course, anxious to have her 
 things in the most severely chased style. 
 
 42. To be reminded that it is the first of April, by discovering a label 
 with an inscription, pinned to yonr shawl behind, or that you are carrying 
 one end of a string, the other end of which is supported by a small but 
 active kite. 
 
 43. Having promised to assist a friend by playing at a musical soire'e, 
 to liave a professional musician perform your only prepared piece before 
 your turn comes or after. 
 
 44. Receiving a bouquet^ anonymously, as you suppose ; and, after 
 displaying it to the family, to discover a note appended, which proves it 
 to belong to your next-door neighbor. 
 
 45. At the opera or a new" spectacle to have your opera-glass bor- 
 rowed of you by people who have no claim for such accommodation 
 always kept until you ask for it, and always borrowed again as soon as 
 you happen to let it down or change hands. 
 
 46. To have some kindly-intentioned friend, who has offered to assist 
 you in writing invitations for a large party, date all hers " Teusday" or 
 " \Vensday," you not discovering this till you see one afterwards in a card- 
 basket 
 
 47. Going to a party on a different clay from the one for which you 
 wore invited especially a fancy ball. 
 
 48. On breaking up housekeeping, to send some things to a friend to 
 
 7*
 
 I ."> I THE MISFHIES of HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Moilerri sociability. Oil, Pride, thou hftt-jtfxt to make mankind wretched. 
 
 keep for you, and to receive in return a note, thanking you for your kiud 
 and useful presents I 
 
 49. When you are giving a small party, from which you have been 
 obliged to leave out some of your acquaintances to have some of the 
 excluded call during the evening. 
 
 50. To be invited to spend a social evening ; and, on going, timed and 
 dressed accordingly, to arrive an hour before any one was expected, and 
 before any one but yourself appears. Your dress is, of course, conspicu- 
 ously inappropriate during the whole evening. 
 
 61. The converse of the above. 
 
 52. On getting out of an omnibus at the end of a shopping expedition 
 to find that you have but four <ients left. N. B. The pleasure of explain- 
 ing this to the deaf driver in the presence of eleven strange gentlemen. 
 
 53. After pronouncing judgment against some article of vertu in pos- 
 session of a friend, to find that it was intended for a present to yourself. 
 
 Ned Tes. That will do for the present. 
 
 54. After having invited a large party to dinner within a few hours 
 of then- expected arrival, some of the most indispensable servants (cook in 
 particular) seized with the influenza, smallpox, Ac., when it is quite too 
 late to look out for substitutes, or to put off the engagement 
 
 55. While playing on the piano-forte, being obsedee by the attentions 
 of a courteous gentleman, (quite ignorant of music,) who turns over the 
 leaf of your music-book a dozen bars too soon, and in his zeal to be 
 soon enough, pulls down the book on the keys, and one of the candles 
 into your lap. 
 
 Ned Tes. It is worse to be the awkward gawk that does it. 
 Experto crede. 
 
 56. If you are a single woman, with a reasonable stock of delicacy 
 and pride being rallied by a facetious gentleman, in a company where 
 you are not very much known, on the subject of a husband.
 
 mi': J//.SA///AX OF . //'/;. 
 
 A. carriage is like a lottery prize : II.-MT ih-'iirn wliou one wants it. 
 
 57. If you arc afflicto-d with the mala !y of blu.-hin^ to road in the 
 complatvnt smile of a coxcomb who has accosted you, tliat he think.-* you 
 are interested in his attentiona 
 
 Ned Tes. The necessity of talking to him at all must be 
 painful, but Ainsworth says, " Anser a goose." 
 
 58. A carriage which is of little or no use to you, because your coach- 
 man generally- chooses either to bo sick himself, or that his horses should 
 be lame or his carriage at the blacksmith's ; yet you are afraid to part with 
 him, as, unluckily, he is a careful driver, and extremely sober, aud you a 
 great coward. 
 
 Ned Tes. He represents the carriage-wheels as being tired, 
 when he desires repose for himself. By the by, speaking of 
 carriages, why needn't a good-natured dog's tail be a foot 
 long? 
 
 Sen. Couldn't tell, I'm sure. 
 
 Ned Tes. It needn't be a-foot long, because it keeps 
 a-waggin*. 
 
 Tes. (sternly.) Mrs. Testy, proceed, if you please. 
 
 59. A termagant cook, who suffers neither yourself nor your servants 
 to have a moment's peace yet, as she is an excellent cook, and your hus- 
 band a great epicure, you are obliged to smother your feelings, and seem 
 both blind and deaf to all her tantrums. 
 
 60. Working, half asleep, at a beautiful piece of fine netting, in the 
 evening and on returning to it iu the morning, discovering that you have 
 totally ruined it 
 
 61. Snapping your thread quite close to your work, so that yon cannot 
 join it without picking out the knot that is, breaking two or tliree loops. 
 
 62. Being disappointed by a hair-dresser on a ball-night, when you 
 have left your hair totally uncurled, in full dependence upon him : in this 
 emergency, being obliged to accept the offered services of a kind female
 
 156 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 A dis-tressed damsel. The meshes ladies weave are sometime* labor lost. 
 
 friend, who makes you an absolute fright, burning off a curl or t\vt> with 
 the tongs ; but she being much older than yourself, and of acknowledged 
 judgment, you dare not pull it all to pieces ; and if you should, you have 
 neither time nor skill to put it to rights again. 
 
 " AE CURL FRAE MAR Y'S BONNY LOCKS." (BuTHS f) 
 
 63. At a ball being asked by two or three puppies " why you don't 
 dunce f and asked no more questions, by these, or any other gentlemen, 
 on the subject : on your return home, being pestered with examinations and 
 cross-examinations, whether you danced with wliom you danced why 
 you did not dance, <fec., <tc. ; the friend with whom you went complaining 
 all the time of being worried to death with solicitations to dance the' whole 
 evening. 
 
 64. At a long table, after dinner, the eyes of the whole company 
 drawn upon yon by a loud observation that you are strikingly like Mrs. 
 or Miss , particularly when you smile. 
 
 65. The only thimble which you ever could get to fit you exactly, 
 rolling off the table unheeded ; then, crushed to death in a moment by the 
 splay foot of a servant 
 
 66. After having consumed three years on a piece of crochet work, 
 which has been the wonder of the female world, leaving it, on the very 
 day you have finished it, in the hackney coach in which you were exult- 
 ingly carrying it to the friend whom you intended to surprise with it as a 
 present ; afterwards repeatedly advertising all in vain.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN Llb'K. 157 
 
 Part-ies of pleasure well named. The pleasure isn't in the meeting. 
 
 67. Receiving the first liiut that your thimble has a hole worn through 
 it, from the needle, as it runs, bead and shoulders, under the nail 
 
 68. On retiring, after dinner, without a female companion being re- 
 quested by one of the party to permit a stupid, gawky boy of about 1 4 to 
 accompany you ; in this distress, you can neither have recourse to books, 
 of which lie knows nothing, nor to music, which he declares himself to 
 hate ; so that, after having extorted from him how many brothers and 
 sisters he has, what school he goes to, and what are the games now in 
 season, you are condemned to total silence, which is interrupted only by 
 the squeaks of your favorite puppy or kitten, as he amtigea himself by 
 pinching and plaguing it during the remainder of the ttitc-a-te'te. 
 
 69. At a ball when you have set your heart on dancing with a par- 
 ticular favorite at the moment when you delightedly see him advancing 
 towards you, being briskly accosted by a conceited simpleton at your 
 elbow, whom you cannot endure, but who obtains (because you know not 
 in what manner to refuse) " the honor of your hand" for the evening. 
 
 70. When you are giving a party, and have just begun to have hopes 
 that it is to be a " successful go," from the spirit of the dancing and the 
 general hum that fills the pauses of the music to have a few pounds of 
 ceiling shaken down ; recalling the old fashions of powdered heads and 
 sanded floors. 
 
 Ned Tes. How mortar-fied you must all be! "Similia 
 similibus curantur ;" but no plaster could heal the wound in 
 your entertainment. 
 
 Tes. For me, you might make one misery of the whole 
 race of meetings that now go under the name of parties. The 
 only thing tolerable I ever find about them is, the little 
 whist table that sometimes collects in the dressing-room, with 
 no connection with the noisy misery below, except the dis- 
 turbing roar you can't entirely get rid of. 
 
 Ned Tes. In other words, you prefer the private coat-ery 
 to the public bawl.
 
 158 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Compassionable ugliness. (Tue consequences of the small pox are to be pitted.) 
 
 Mrs. Tcs. Well, I've come to the end of my list, though 
 I haven't complained of the fate of us elderly ladies, who 
 martyr-ize ourselves to matronize our daughters. 
 
 Ned Tes. Wall-flowers should not be allowed to go with- 
 out a. tack. 
 
 Tes. However, my dear, you have proved yourself toler- 
 ably unhappy for a lady. 
 
 Sen. (bowing.) He means, madam, for a lady who has 
 been all her life the admiration of one sex and the envy of 
 the other. If you can show such a list, what should we have 
 to expect from some ! 
 
 " Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true," 
 
 that a little difference in the proportions of a lady's face 
 makes an immense difference in her fate ; whereas it ought 
 to make none except as an exponent of character. 
 
 Ned Tes. A woman may be subject to having many a 
 slight cast in her teeth, merely from having a slight cast in 
 her eyes. 
 
 Sen. A fortune-teller nowadays should look not at the 
 lines of the hand, but at the lines of the face. 
 
 Ned Tes. And the \\i\iny of the pockets. 
 
 Mrs. Tes. I thank you, Mr. Sensitive, for my sex, since 
 we are in a position where we must be grateful for justice ; 
 and now, having done my best, you will honorably dismiss 
 me from the service, I suppose. 
 
 Tes. With pleasure. 
 
 Sen. With pain. 
 
 Ned Tes. Scandal says that to be dis-missed is the first 
 object of women's lives. 
 
 Sen. And scandal lies. Such sayings as that, I think,
 
 TllK MISKH1HS OF HUMAN Llh'l'. 159 
 
 Mote* arc not defensible In eye-warfare. Beams can overcome them. 
 
 must be originated by disappointed suitors. Let man pull the 
 beam from his own eye before he looks for motes in the eyes 
 of the other sex. 
 
 Ned Tes. Men can make in this case, with a better grace 
 than usual, the invariable rejoinder (expressed or understood) 
 to that quotation. 
 
 Sen. What answer is that, Ned ? 
 
 Ned Tes. "The motes are in our eyes, and the learns are 
 in the eyes of our opponents."
 
 160 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Miseries miscellaneous. Who shall prescribe when doctors disagree with you? 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Miseries miscellaneous. Who shall prescribe when doctors disagree with you? 
 " Any thing by way of change." More the cry now than ever. An income to be 
 drawn and a nincom to draw it. Caricature portraits. (A daggcr-o'-type natu- 
 rally suggests a libel.) Take Time by his forelock, and he'll retaliate on yours. 
 Tears decline, vanity does not except that it declines to own up. If you've 
 tarred your hair, retard the comb. A de-voted candidate. Mating a spectacle 
 of oneself by borrowing those of a friend. The bookmakers; a great class. 
 " Write away" is an appropriate Americanism. A clerk's not the man to cut a 
 figure. He knows them all too well. Mr. Testy takes the rains in his own hands. 
 A i>-serving youth, with a Z>-sire to please. The race of beggars. (A hand-i'-cap 
 race.) Resignation is a virtue that office-holders are loth to practice. The Tea- 
 room. More-tea-flcation of the flesh agrees with aldermanic corporations. The 
 pavior who cobbles half the street and blocks the whole. We're in the reforming 
 vein. Our efforts are probably in vain too. Ice calls for slippers as naturally as 
 water does for pumps. Sick transit : from the odor of flowery buds to that of 
 Bowery floods. PatA-ological researches. Has our work any mission but dis- 
 mission? Plans. An outline of the forces a mere shell, having no colonel. All 
 appears to be dished : or, what's equivalent, be>-4rayed. The greatest misery of 
 all for the reader the end. 
 
 Sen. I'll tell you what is a curious sort of a misery, but 
 nevertheless a genuine one, as mankind is constituted. 
 
 1. A doctor who persists in telling you that there is nothing the mat- 
 ter with you, instead of giving you medicine suited to the importance you 
 think attaches to your ailments. 
 
 Ned Tes. Or one who always reiterates the same word, 
 which would be equally appropriate if the complaint were red 
 hair! 
 
 Sen. What word is that, Ned ? 
 
 Ned Tes. Diet. 
 
 2. To see a slight acquaintance approaching at a distance, as you walk 
 along an empty sidewalk, whom you know you must bow to when you 
 meet, and not before.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 161 
 
 " Any thing by way of change." More the cry now than ever. 
 
 3. To have a new, fashionable acquaintance look full round at you, to 
 see who it was whistling so elaborately behind him ! 
 
 Sen. The awkwardness and uncertainty whether to bite 
 off your tune in the middle of a bar, or go on with a painful 
 effort at indifference, is agonizing. 
 
 Ned Tes. The first, certainly. Don't throw the cloak of 
 hypocrisy over the breaches of good manners. 
 
 4. Laboring in vain to do up a parcel with scanty, weak, bursting 
 paper, and thin, short, rotten string. 
 
 5. Receiving a quantity of thin sixpences in change at a shop, and 
 striving to pick up the separate pieces against the.rim, or ridge of the 
 counter, but with such cruelly short nails, and in such violent haste, that 
 you barely raise the edge of the coin, so as to cut and gall the quick of 
 your fingers, from which the piece drops flat every time. 
 
 6. After the first or prelusive squall of a fractious brat, which you 
 had taken in your arms to please its mother the honible pause during 
 which you perceive that it is collecting breath to burst out with a fresh 
 and recruited scream, that is to thrill through your marrow ; yet you know 
 that, strange to say, if you throttle it, the law will throttle you ! 
 
 *7. The necessity of sending a verbal message of the utmost conse- 
 quence, by an ass who, you plainly perceive, will forget (or rather has 
 already forgotten) every word you have been saying. 
 
 8. Your snuff-box shutting 511 or rather, not shutting at all ; so that 
 you cany the snuff and the box, separately, in your pocket 
 
 9. The dead silence of your capricious watch, when you are anxiously 
 listening for its tick. 
 
 10. The moment of recollecting that you have sent a letter, unsealed, 
 containing all your most profound and delicate secrets, by one who, you 
 know, will pay himself for postage, by very freely participating in your 
 confidence.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 11. Going about for days together with a gaping cut in your right 
 hand, (your bad sticking-plaster immediately coining off as often as you 
 apply it,) till it is choked with dust, as well as widened and inflamed, by 
 rubbing against every thing. Also 
 
 1 2. The process of buttoning and tying your clothes (ditto of washing 
 your hands) when the fingers are in so maimed a condition, that fastening 
 one button in a quarter of an hour is doing great thinga 
 
 13. Going cheerily to the bank for your dividends, on leaving town, 
 and after waiting an hour before you can be served, suddenly discovering 
 that you must wait considerably longer having lost your memoranda of 
 all the names and sums upon which you are to receive ! 
 
 14. In going out'to sea in a fishing-boat with a delightful party, con- 
 tinuing desperately sick the whole time ; the rest of the company quite 
 gay and well. 
 
 15. On instituting a severe scrutiny into the state of your hair, from 
 the sudden and alarming detection of a bald spot finding yourself at 
 least ten years nearer to a wig than you had at all apprehended. 
 
 16. When you are half asleep receiving and wading through a long, 
 dull, obscure, illegible, ungrammatical, misspelt, ill-pointed, letter of busi- 
 ness requiring a copious answer by the bearer. 
 
 17. In walking the streets closely following, for above half an hour, 
 a fellow with a heel as long as his foot, over which an inch of leather 
 barely peeps behind ; so that the foot seems, at every step, in the act of 
 slipping out of the shoe till you, at length, desperately wish it would 
 happen, that the worst may be over. 
 
 Sen. I mention this misery to you, Mr. Testy, with hesitation, 
 as we have been told that there are some "joys, which none 
 but madmen know ;" so are there some " miseries," which 
 none but the nervous know : and this, I easily conceive, may 
 be one.
 
 THE .I/7.s7-.7.'//.'s' OF HUMAN L1FK. 103 
 
 Caricature jiortraitn. (A (linmrr-o'-typt naturally sutrwsta a Wirl.) 
 
 18. AttcT bathing tin.- ilull, rumbling, rushing sound which continues 
 nil day long in your cars, and which all your tweaking, nuzzling, and 
 rummaging at them, serves only to increase. 
 
 19. After having, with great difficulty, persuaded a friend to sit for 
 hi* or her pirtuiv, and then feasting yourself with the thoughts of pos- 
 sessing a fac simile, which the great fume of the artist encouraged you to 
 <xj>rct reviving, after long delays, what proves to be the face of any 
 one but your friend ! 
 
 Sen. That's nothing compared to the being so caricatured 
 yourself, so that your friend, instead of being agreeably sur- 
 prised, as you purposed, is astounded ! 
 
 Ned Tes. The first's " a mere drop in the bucket," as the 
 boy said when he fished his tooth-brush out of the slop-pail. 
 
 Sen. What say you to daguerreotypes ? 
 
 Tes. One of the most valuable inventions of the age for 
 the checking of vanity. I like them. T/hey don't flatter, but 
 on the contrary they exaggerate. 
 
 Sen. They are invaluable, even in the art's present imper- 
 fect state ; but the time will come when you can snap up, and 
 petrify, a friend's face, literally " in the twinkling of an eye." 
 For a countenance that depends on an animated expression 
 for its charm to a friend, daguerreotypes are wofully defi- 
 cient. To my own face, they have a perfectly corpsc-ifying 
 effect. 
 
 Ned Tes. En-$rrave-ings on steel they should be classed 
 with. 
 
 Tes. How many millions there must be in the world 
 already ! No house I go into but I come across a pile of 
 little, rough, imitation-morocco, maroon-colored cases, with 
 ugly black countenances inside, and I always pass them by, 
 without the first sensation of interest in them.
 
 164 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Take Time by his forelock, and he'll retaliate on yours. 
 
 Ned Tes. They 
 
 " Come like shadows, so depart" 
 
 * 
 
 20. The season when you first begin to have " a realizing sense" of the 
 approach of age, and before you get accustomed to the consciousness of 
 having 
 
 ONE FOREHEAD TOO MANY 
 
 ONE CHIN TOO MANY 
 
 and a good many teeth too few. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) I should think father must have been 
 ^rty-fied, some years ago, against feelings of that sort. 
 
 Sen. And these manifestations seem to come in such 
 showers when they once begin. The more of & fast man you
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 165 
 
 Tears decline, vanity does not except that it declines to own up. 
 
 have been while on the ascending grade, the faster, when you 
 have once passed the summit, you tear down the vale of de- 
 clining years and with ever-increasing reminders. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) You " tear down the veil" when you let 
 out how much you are distressed by what all men ought to 
 consider marks of honor. 
 
 21. Breaking a phial of asafcetida in your pocket ; and then mangling, 
 as well as poisoning, your fingers, in taking out the bits of broken glass. 
 
 22. Hiding your eyes with your hand, for a whole evening together, 
 in vain attempts to recover a tune, or a name ; said tune, <fec., repeatedly 
 flitting before you, but so rapidly as never to be fairly caught 
 
 23. Suddenly finding out that your watch has lost two or three hours, 
 while you have been revelling in a fool's paradise of leisure, and uncon- 
 sciously outstaying your appointments, and disordering all the arrange- 
 ments of the day, with nothing to have prevented you from adhering to 
 them with perfect ease. 
 
 24. Jn handing a glass of wine, or some brittle article of great beauty 
 and value, to another person suddenly quitting your hold of it, under a 
 false idea that he has taken his. " Guess, ah, guess the rest!" 
 
 25. In pumping the dry, wheezing hiss, and dead, thumping drop of 
 the handle, as you keep working it, with vain hopes of water. 
 
 26. Showing the colleges, public buildings, and other remarkables of 
 the city, for the 500th time, to a party who discover no signs of life 
 during the whole perambulation 
 
 27. Buying a pocket-handkerchief on an emergency so pressing, that 
 you have no time to get it hemmed ; so that, before the day is half over, it 
 is all in strings. 
 
 28. Eagerly breaking open a letter, which, from the superscription, 
 you conclude to be from a dear and long-absent friend ; and then, finding it 
 to contain nothing but a tradesman's long bill, which, moreover, you
 
 lf>6 THE MISERIES OF nUXAN LIFE. 
 
 If yon'vo tarred your hair, retard the comb. A de-voted candidate. 
 
 ad been long ago discliarged; but of which immediate payment 
 is demanded iii a very valiant letter, in closing the account : cash extremely 
 low. 
 
 29. Walking fast, and far, to overtake a woman, from whose shape 
 and air, as viewed en derriere, you have decided that her face is angelic ; 
 till, on eagerly turning round, as you pass her, you are petrified by a 
 Gorgon ! 
 
 Ned Tes. A dismal transition, indeed, from " O dea, 
 certe !" to 
 
 " remove fera monstra, tureque 
 
 Saxificos vultys, quaecunque ea, tolle Medusae !" OVTD. 
 
 SO. After .having bought, and paid for, some expensive article, 
 thinking you had lost such another unexpectedly finding the latter ; then 
 endeavoring, in vain, to persuade the iron shopkeeper to take back your 
 purchase, and return the money. 
 
 81. Struggling through the curse of trying to disentangle your hair, 
 when, by poking curiously about on board of ship, it has become matted 
 with pitch or tar, far beyond all the powers of the comb. 
 
 32. Suddenly finding, safe in your pocket, three or four letters of the 
 most pressing consequence, intrusted to your care a week or a fortnight 
 before, by a person hardly known to you, upon the faith of your promise 
 to put them into the post within an hour. 
 
 33. As a candidate to be thrown out by a casting vote ; and this, 
 when your party was so strong, that many of your friends kept away, on 
 the certainty that you would muster far more than enough without them.* 
 
 * When Piron was defeated as a candidate for the Royal Academy, 
 he wrote his epitaph : 
 
 Ci git Piron qui ne fut ricn 
 Pas ir.dme Academicien ! 
 
 Here lies Piron to 'whom, Fate never assigned his ]x>sition : 
 A cipher lie went to U e tomb not even an Academician !
 
 THE .WKRIE* <>F 1 [I'M AN 1. 1 1' I'. 107 
 
 u -I'l-rtiicle of oneself by Ijornncing those of a friend. 
 
 :;l. in\vt< rai<- bnakuMK oomiag on y>u at the innmnit <if bagjooiag 
 to address a crowded audience, esp.-eially il' they attribute your difficulty 
 of -jM-aking to a little too generous fragment previously. 
 
 Ned Tes. They would naturally suppose you to be corned, 
 to account for your being husky. 
 
 m 
 
 AI'UT having long hunted in vain for a missing bank-note of $100, 
 an 1 just as you are in the act of accusing an honest servant, on very sus- 
 picious appearances, of having made a perquisite of it suddenly spying 
 v>ut tin- last rag of its remains in the mouth and paws ot' a puppy, who 
 had slyly embezzled it, for his own private recreation. 
 
 S e 
 
 56. Paying the bills of blacksmiths, butchers, " et hoc genus onine," 
 and receiving in change, notes, silver, and pence, in a condition but too 
 stnmirly impressing upon your mind the truth of the adage, that " riches 
 are but dirt f 
 
 37. Learning, among other interesting communications in a letter just 
 received from a deal- friend abroad, that about a dozen of your lust 
 pacquets, on both sides, have missed their way. 
 
 Sen, The following I should address to the rneagre-visaged, 
 like myself, rather than to such a well-fed sufferer as you are, 
 Mr. Testy : 
 
 38. The necessity of borrowing the spectacles of a moon-faced friend. 
 Ned Tes. Very bothering, indeed ! 
 
 " Non hoc ista sibi TEMPUS spectacula poscit." Vrao. 
 
 39. After bathing in the river on returning to the bank for your 
 clothes, finding that a passing thief has taken a sudden fancy to the cut of 
 every article of your di 
 
 40. To find, after writing a letter of directions to your lawyer, and 
 another to the man against whom he is conducting an ini]x>rtant suit, that
 
 168 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The bookmakers ; a great class. " Write away" is an appropriate Americanism. 
 
 you have reversed the directions, and sent the plan of the campaign to 
 the eneinv ; and, what is more disagreeable, a private dispatch on the folly 
 of litigation in general to your ally the lawyer, which you meant only for 
 the eye of your opponent. 
 
 41. To have, for a poor relation, an industrious, deserving fellow, who 
 knows the art of making a dollar (into a dime) in shorter time tha:ilmo.-t 
 any other man in the world. One of that sort of men who seem so 
 doomed to misfortune, that if they were to become hatters, you would 
 expect the next generation to be born without heads ! Who would be sure 
 to live for ever if they insured their lives, but die incontinently on buying 
 an annuity ! 
 
 * 
 
 Ned Tes. I know who you mean, father. Some one who 
 is very fond of you, and requires continual Testy-money of 
 your affection for him. 
 
 Sen. My life was mercantile for years, you know, Testy, 
 and I have witnessed and experienced a thousand things cal- 
 culated to satisfy any one, foolish enough to grub over our 
 notes to find how much cause he has to be miserable. Now, 
 I have a little lot of these written down, which we may as 
 well have here as any where else, though, perhaps, it should 
 properly have made part of the literary miseries. No one 
 has more to do with writing than a clerk, though he has but 
 few claims to the name of an author. His figures are not of 
 speech. His journal is never printed, though bound before it 
 is written. What he writes is of no value except to the 
 owner. How many authors I know, about whose writings 
 you need make no exception ! 
 
 Ned Tes. The clerk keeps his books, and the publisher 
 keeps the authors' : much against his will, too, for they do not 
 pay for their board. 
 
 Tes. Let's have them by all means. A good misery is 
 never amiss.
 
 Til /: MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 169 
 
 A clerk's not the man to cut a figure. He knows them all too well. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) If he had said that a good Miss was 
 never a misery, (except in sporting,) he would have come 
 nearer my ideas. 
 
 Sen. Well, here goes, 
 
 42. In making application for a situation, which it is of vital and actual 
 importance, or, in one word, of victual importance, to you to secure to 
 have your nervousness overpower your common sense entirely, so as to 
 fool, at the most critical moment, that you are appearing at the worst 
 possible disadvantage. Then to have a " little" interest calculation to do, 
 to show your quickncxx at figures. To crown all, to be asked for a speci- 
 njtn of your off-haud penmanship, when your hand trembles like an aspen ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Making the " specimen" look as if it had been 
 written by an ass-penman, I suppose. 
 
 43. Or, on the other hand, to doubt, as you go home, whether you 
 have not been too plausible ; whether you ha^e not committed that great- 
 est of mistakes in a clerk talking too much. 
 
 44. If you are not above errand-running to be sent long walks, 
 repeatedly, with different messages, in the same direction, which a little 
 considcrateness and calculation in the sender would have enabled you to 
 accomplish all at ouce. 
 
 45. A general carelessness in laying out your work, or an unaccount- 
 able fatality which makes each job twice as laborious as it need be ; and 
 then at night being compelled to walk two or three miles home, for lack 
 of a sixpence to pay an omnibus fare ; your walk enlivened with cogitating 
 as to what can have become of your porte-monuaie ! 
 
 Sen. After having, with unwonted care and expense, got 
 up your personal appearance to a pitch gratifying to your 
 vanity, imagine your chagrin in the following dilemma : 
 
 46. To be caught, in a storm, at the store, while your two umbrellas 
 are at home, or vice versa. Or, worse than either, to take a long walk 
 
 8
 
 170 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Mr. Testy takes the rains iu his own hands. 
 
 with a brokeu concern that cannot be made to stay up, except by holding 
 one weary arm high above your head, while the dilapidated plague lets in 
 a stream of rain-water round the handle, that runs down your hand and 
 arm under the sleeve. 
 
 Ned Tes. If I could not dam the stream, I should be 
 tempted to d n the umbrella, I think. 
 
 Tes. \ walked a mile the other day, with a new white hat 
 on, under another description of umbrella. It was new, and 
 the handle was good, and the cover was good, but they were 
 not fast together ; and the top, when I opened it, slipped off 
 the end over the ferule, and wagged its head about like an 
 idiot ! I never was angrier in my life ! The points hung 
 almost close together, and poked and dribbled about my 
 head, and when I got home I found that the color had soaked 
 out of the rascally cotton, and my hat looked as if it had been 
 made of the skin of the Woolly Horse, after drowning him 
 in an ocean of ink ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Ink-creasing torments ! 
 
 Tes. You never had any experience of the retail trade, 
 Sensitive 1 
 
 Sen. No, indeed. That is a very different thing. I would 
 much rather carry bricks in a hod all day. I should have 
 died a miserable death if it had been my fate to sell goods to 
 some ladies I know. 
 
 Ned Tes. If your lot had been retail, you would never 
 have lived to re-tell the tale. 
 
 47. To be interrupted in adding up a whole ledger column of figures 
 when within four or five of the end ; and then, in your rage, forgetting 
 what you carried from the previous column, so as to be compelled to add 
 that over to begin with. 
 
 48. To get down late the only morning in the week when your
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 171 
 
 A />-nerving youth, with a />-sire to please. 
 
 employer gets down early, so as to leave him to suppose that if he always 
 arrived at that hour he would be before you. 
 
 Sen. From subsequent experience I can give you a few 
 specimens of the business annoyances of employers as well as 
 employees. 
 
 49. To have an affected clerk one who, for example, is ridiculously 
 respectful and deferential, especially before strangers. 
 
 50. To have to take the shiftless, dissipated son of a friend, and then 
 struggle on with him, though he mortifies you in every way, knowing that 
 to turn him off would be his ruin. 
 
 Ned Tes. Looking forward to ruin the day you turn him 
 
 away, even while rue-in" 1 the day you took him 
 
 Sen. Besides offending the whole family. 
 
 51. Receiving a call from a person whom you know, and who knows 
 you, but whose name your memory, with a strange obstinacy, refuses to 
 recall. The longer you feign perfect recognition, (in hopes of his giving 
 you some clue, or of its flashing upon you,) the more impossible it seems 
 to ask him. At length, you let him depart, and turn to your ledger index, 
 and read every^name from A to Z ; or, if he mentions any important 
 business matter that must be attended to, you are forced to make the 
 mortifying declaration that you have not the slightest idea of whom you 
 have been chatting with. 
 
 52. To have some mistaken statement of yours corrected in such a 
 way that you know the hearer must think that the clerk is more honest 
 than you wished him to be. 
 
 Tes. That is one of those cases where any effort to clear 
 yourself would only show a consciousness of being suspected, 
 and exceedingly ticklish and puzzling cases they are to treat. 
 
 53. To have your credit doubted when you are in the humor to think 
 it a personal insult, even while you know what a fool you would think any 
 other man who took it in the same way.
 
 172 
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The race of beggars. (A hand-i'-cap race.) 
 
 64. To have to conduct your aide of a violent quarrel on business 
 matters in the presence of the whole posse comitatus of clerks, porters, Ac. 
 Or 
 
 55. After having been away on such an errand, to come to the store 
 to pour it into the sympathetic ear of your partner especially if he is a 
 little deaf. 
 
 Ned Tes. In that case he is only an add-er to your troubles. 
 
 56. The whole race of beggars. 
 
 ^s^ 
 
 o LORD HERE'S ANOTHER ! 
 
 Sen. I'm not naturally an uncharitable man, but 
 
 Ned Tes. On the contrary, you would have liked to have 
 
 set them all on horseback. 
 
 Sen. Ha, ha! That would better the race, as you would 
 
 say.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LH'K. 173 
 
 Resignation is a virtue that office-holders are loth to practice. 
 
 Tes. We have never yet. carried out our intention of 
 attacking the municipal abuses. 
 
 Sen. Well, suppose we finish by responding to a few of 
 the loudest calls for reformers. 
 
 Ned Tes. It's a pity that class of people hadn't been born 
 with a caul. 
 
 Sen. You mean the reformers, of coarse. The opposite 
 class need no preservative against being drowned! 
 
 57. To look over the opposition papers the morning after paying your 
 enormous city taxes, and see what an outrageous system of corruption yoor 
 money has gone to sustain. 
 
 Tes. I'll be hanged, Sensitive, if it is not enough to make 
 a man forswear the world, and retire to Coney Island for 
 ever, to attempt to keep an eye on the New York city 
 government ! Executive common council police street- 
 sweepers all, from the highest to the lowest all together or 
 all in turn either for inefficiency or for rascality, or both are 
 a disgrace to the city, and deserve to be a byword for all time ! 
 
 Sen. There you go, Testy. Off like a rocket, far awajr 
 from us common people, and blazing away in rnid air. 
 
 Tes. No, I'm not. I'm mild and moderate. The worst I 
 could say would be flattery, compared to their deserts ! 
 
 Sen. Yes, you are, and you instinctively acknowledge it, 
 for you raise your voice higher as you go farther and farther, 
 as a man might who was going up in a balloon, and still 
 keeping up a conversation with the people below. Now, the 
 fact is, I have long ago decided that the only way to get 
 along coolly and philosophically, without bursting blood- 
 vessels, or doing other disgusting, disagreeable things of the 
 same sort, was to change your politics as often as the city 
 government changed, and take only those papers that sup-
 
 174 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The Tea-room. More-Tea-flcation of the flesh agrees with aldcrmanic corporation*. 
 
 ported it through thick and thin. To be sure, I was rather 
 puzzled this year, on account of the executive being one side, 
 and the legislative the other ; but I soon decided to subscribe 
 for the papers that support the latter, as that needs it most, 
 and the knowledge of the truth as to their sins would make 
 me angriest. It circumscribed my newspaper reading terribly, 
 and reduced me to one or two pretty hard specimens of the 
 tribe ; but, on the other hand, it has kept my state of mind 
 benign and balmy compared to yours. 
 
 Tes. That sort of talk is all nonsense ! You know very 
 well, Sensitive, that the city government in New York is a 
 nuisance. 
 
 Ned Tes. A nuisance of long standing, blue-moulded for 
 want of a-bating, as the pugnacious Irishman professed him- 
 self to be when he couldn't get any body to fight him. 
 
 Tes. The police force is miserably inefficient. Rowdies 
 abound, so that honest men can't sleep. Their hand is against 
 every man, and no man's hand is against them ! 
 
 Ned Tes. They conspire against the rest of the community. 
 
 Tes. The very watchmen have their own pockets picked 
 while asleep on their posts ! 
 
 Ned Tes. They are so used to arresting, that they can do 
 it with their eyes shut. 
 
 Tes. Why do the authorities fail to prevent prize fights, 
 that every body knows of beforehand, except themselves ? 
 Why is not a stop put to boxing matches? 
 
 Ned Tes. Matches ought to be boxed, to prevent being 
 scattered about and setting fire to things : in which case there 
 is more disturbance, as the fire-engine is not necessarily a 
 moral engine.' 
 
 Tes. And in case of a fight between two companies, the 
 police always arrive in time to arrest the spectators.
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN Llt'K. 175 
 
 The ptvior who fobMr* half the street and block* the whol*. 
 
 Sen. If we lacked information in respect to the loafer nui- 
 sance, the ladies could (in the language of the sturdy and 
 unrestrained beggary of the day) 
 
 " GIVE OS A LITTLE MORE !" 
 
 Tes. That Perrine pavement, I'd I'd 
 
 Sen. Perrine, I confess, is an abuse that one does not have 
 to look into the papers to see. In fact, you only have to go 
 to them for an alleviation, in the amusement to be got from 
 the jibes and vituperation and attacks of every sort they heap 
 upon it. Nothing could be more magnificent than the unani- 
 mous and spirited charge of the journal squadron, unless it 
 were the manner in which he threw himself into the centre of 
 a square, and withstood it. 
 
 Ned Tes. Or the charge he made on the city treasury 
 when he got through. 
 
 Sen. The amusement is something. And then consider 
 how kind it was of the omnibus drivers to turn out a whole 
 block, as they did for months, that their fellow-citizens might 
 not be irritated by the sight of the unmoved inventor, that 
 great man of brass ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Colossus of streets, he may be called, in contra- 
 distinction to that other wonder of the world, that great man 
 of brass, the Colossus of Rhodes. 
 
 Sen. No doubt but he is a man of good intentions, and
 
 176 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 "We're in the reforming vein. Our efforts are probably in vain too. 
 
 the worst we con wish him is, that he should go where they 
 would be of most use to him as a pavior ! 
 
 Ned Tes. Quousque tandem (and all other sorts of vehicles) 
 abutere, O Perrina? &c. Or, what amounts to the same 
 thing : O Russ quando te aspiciam 1 
 
 58. When one half of the street is deep with mad, (collected in the 
 morning, and distributed gradually by the wheels, instead of being carried 
 away,) and the other half quite respectable to ruin your temper and your 
 patent leathers in crossing the muddy half, and then have your further 
 progress nipped in the bud by being cut off by the first of a line of 
 walking omnibuses, gradually widening and breaking into a trot toward 
 its lower end, so as to compel a precipitate retreat over the ground just 
 travelled. 
 
 Sen. How very Irish that plan of the street-sweepers is ! 
 There you may see them, day after day, risking their precious 
 bones and broomsticks by insinuating their way through the 
 crowded streets to roll up masses that are never carried 
 away ! A regular Sysiphean labor ! 
 
 Ned Tes. 
 
 " I meet them on their winding way" 
 
 which is only characteristic of the Cork's crew employed. 
 
 Sen. The streets are pretty nearly unmitigated annoy- 
 ances as they are. But we shall have Russ in Urbe all over 
 one of these days. 
 
 Tes. Even the best pavement is bad enough after a 
 freezing rain or hail-storm. For instance 
 
 59. To find yourself poised, both feet together 
 
 Ned Tes. It's a bad plan to poise-on your feet, if it is at 
 all like rny school misery of poisoning my hands.
 
 THE 
 
 OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 177 
 
 Ice calls for 
 
 60. To find yourself poi-ed, Uitli leet tn^ether. in tlu> midst of a glare 
 of ice, so slippery that it is with the utmost difficulty and danger you can 
 make the least effort of propulsion. 
 
 AN ICE PROSPECT. 
 
 Ned Tes. One of the modern city politicians would be the 
 person to consult in your dilemma. Their whole lives being 
 one continued effort to get off-ice^ they have no lack of expe- 
 rience. 
 
 61. To fall a victim, spoiling your clothes and your temper. 
 
 Ned Tes. To the victor belong the spoils^ not the victim ; 
 according to the politician aforesaid. 
 
 Tes. Ned, your puns are a nuisance. 
 
 Ned Tes. Begging your pardon, sir, the nuisance is in what 
 you say ; at least I find a new sense for every few words. 
 
 Sen. Stick to the new scents of the city x>f New York. No
 
 178 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Sick transit : from the odor of flowery buds to that of Bowery flood*. 
 
 one need look farther, even for the greatest variety. Not 
 even the famous city of Cologne, with its 
 
 " Eleven thousand virgins, and forty thousand" 
 
 unpleasant odors, can vie with it. Coleridge ends his rather 
 coarse epigram on Cologne 
 
 Ned Tts. Eau de (ons) Cologne 
 
 Sen. With these lines : 
 
 " The river Rhine, it is well known, 
 Doth wash the city of Cologne ; 
 Now tell, ye nymphs, what power divine 
 Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine !" 
 
 Ned. He does not countenance the popular idea that 
 the Cologne water we have, is a fair sample of the Rhine after 
 performing the city's ablutions, or that the "natural smell" 
 of the inhabitants can be judged therefrom. 
 
 Sen. No. The anomalous origin of the most celebrated 
 perfume in the world is to be accounted for by the old 
 proverb, " Necessity is the mother of invention." 
 
 Ned Tes. We need seek no father then, I suppose. 
 
 62. To arrive in town, on a sultry summer day, by the Harlem or 
 New Haven Railroad, after a morning ride through the sunny counties 
 that look upon the Sound. 
 
 Ned Tes. " The breezy sound of incense-breathing morn." 
 Sen. Don't make a misquotation, Ned, even for a good 
 pun. 
 
 Ned. The compliment reconciles me to the rebuke. 
 
 63. To arrive thus, with fastidious nostrils, and then to accompany 
 the train " usque ad nauseam." In other words, to go down to the lower 
 depot through the sickening smells of Centre street
 
 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN Lll'l'.. 179 
 
 researches. Has our work any mission but <lis-mislon ? 
 
 Ned Tes. The centre on which turns tho stomach. The 
 scenter of all the vicinity. v 
 
 64. To have to hunt up a friend in one of the newly -settled streets of 
 the city, where every man seems, when he moved in, to have brought the 
 iminbvr-plute of the house he lived in before, and put it up over his door, 
 without the remotest reference to the number his distant next neighbor 
 may happen to show. 
 
 Tes. In other cities, where the streets are not numbered, 
 but named, you have besides to look for the street itself, and 
 nobody ever appears to know where it is. 1 undertook a job 
 of that sort in Brooklyn, not long ago. I wanted to find 
 Wintergreenberry street, or some such ridiculous^ name, and 
 wherever I stopped I gathered a small crowd around me of 
 people who had not the slightest idea. 
 
 65. On arriving at an unknown village, with but one numbered street, 
 to begin at number one, to go to number five hundred, and to find when 
 you get to the end of the street that the fools have numbered up one side 
 and down the other, instead of the whole street along, (odd numbers one 
 side and even the other.) and consequently 500 is nearly opposite the place 
 you started from. 
 
 Tes. That ought rather to go into the travelling miseries, 
 I think. In England they always do so ; in Italy, all through 
 the town, to thousands. 
 
 Sen. Leave that out, then, for we have filled up the meas- 
 ure of our iniquities. The cup is full. Our thousand and 
 one nights are passed away as a tale that is 
 
 Ned Tes. Trod on. Say rather our thousand and one 
 
 mournings. 
 
 Tes. Alas for the fertility of our subject, and the. futility 
 of our efforts to exhuu^t it ! It wants but a little of our 
 accustomed hour for breaking 'jp, and we seem no nearer the
 
 180 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Plans. An outline of the forces a mere shell, having no colonel. 
 
 limit of what we could find to put down than when we first 
 began ! 
 
 Ned Tes. The hours of the meeting are up, before the 
 minutes are all down. 
 
 Tes. There is one thing that can hardly be classed with 
 the little miseries of human life. But it is a "stunner," 
 wherever it belongs, and will do for a parting gun to rake the 
 forces of the contemners of our system. 
 
 66. To be examined and cross-examined as a -witness, by what is 
 called a " smart" lawyer ! 
 
 Ned Tes. The smart appertains rather to the examinee. 
 
 Tes. Your consternation at finding your well-considered 
 statement no more than so much putty in his hands, and 
 that you almost begin to disbelieve it yourself ! And your 
 impotent rage at his impudent efforts to throw you out ! 
 
 Ned Tes. That, no doubt, suggested to the poet the line 
 which runs somewhat like this: 
 
 " Great mad to witness nearly is allied." 
 
 Tes. Well, now we have enlisted our army, what shall we 
 do with them ? 
 
 Sen. Do with them ! Aren't we done with them ? 
 
 Tes. Certainly not. What we have done is but little 
 more than make a list of the forces, from the least to the 
 greatest. 
 
 Ned Tes. A roll-call of the whole army, from Private 
 Griefs and Corporal Ailments, up to General Ills. 
 
 Tes. Now, it remains to send it out to revolutionize the 
 world. Sensitive, we must PUBLISH ! 
 
 Sen. To what end ? Not without some object. I never 
 would put pen to paper merely for the name of having writ- 
 ten a book.
 
 TItK X/XERIEti OF HUMAN LIFE. 181 
 
 All appears to be dished : or, what's equivalent, tte-trayed. 
 
 Ned Tes. In other words, you do not ink-line to be called 
 an author. 
 
 Sen. One question is, who would read our book if we did ? 
 
 Tes. Who? Why, every body. People would buy it as 
 they go to see a tragedy, and weep at it with the gn-atrst 
 delight. There is a morbid tendency in the human mind to 
 dwell on human misery. 
 
 Ned Tes. The book should be sold at auction, if it is to 
 supply a rnore-bid demand. 
 
 Sen. I don't believe in that tendency. I have a different 
 theory from that, for the tragedy taste. I believe that the 
 principal part of that anomaly is the unconscious satisfaction 
 we experience in comparing the fictitious miseries with our 
 own personal lot, and felicitating ourselves with the contrast. 
 Now, our affair is entirely distinct from any thing of that sort. 
 It only reminds the reader either of sorrows of his own, before 
 understood, though not expressed, or of others all the while 
 imminently impending over htm. 
 
 Tea. At any rate, you'll agree with me, that we have 
 es'ablished the point we set out to prove ? 
 
 Sen. The fact is, Testy, to myself I have proved just the 
 contrary. Looking over this mass of scraps, the product of 
 our sociable and agreeable occupation, has convinced me that 
 it needs only a little real misfortune to heal our unreal and 
 artificial ones that our mole-hills are only respectable from 
 having no mountains to compare them with. 1 shall have 
 to thank this episode in my life for making me, I hope, a 
 wiser, and, in future, a happier man. Our miseries look to 
 me like so many illustrations of the fact, that we are prone to 
 manufacture unhappiness when, as in our case, the ready-made 
 article is kept out by a tariff of prosperity a literally pro- 
 tective system.
 
 182 THE MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The greatest misery of all for the reader the end. 
 
 Ned Tes. A real sliding scale not of duties exactly, but 
 rather of immunities from any thing of the sort. 
 
 Tes. \ have not looked at one of them since it was set 
 down. Perhaps I should laugh at them as well as you, after 
 forgetting the impulse that conceived them. 
 
 Sen. If I did not believe that that would be the effect on 
 the reader, as well as on the writer, I would never consent to 
 their publication. The very intensity of the pleasure you- 
 have found as a champion combating for the cause ought to 
 convince you that there is pure pleasure in action of any sort. 
 
 Ned Tes. (aside.) Ought a soldier to find his pleasure 
 in tents? 
 
 Sen. After all, Testy, if this is a pretty hard world 
 
 WHAT ABE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT ? 
 
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