you dealt as freely with my unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be regarded with more than ordinary tenderness.  Let me at least try to feel myself in the ranks with my fellow-men.  It is true, that I would rather not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures.  Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating hand.  I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me.  I really do not want to learn from my enemies:  I prefer having none to learn from.  Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their intervals of business.  In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent longing for approbation, sympathy, and love.

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, or known that I loved her.  Though continually in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as my personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone.  “Your own fault, my dear fellow!” said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiously mentioned this uninteresting fact.  And he was right—­in senses other than he intended.  Why should I expect to be admired, and have my company doated on?  I have done no services to my country beyond those of every peaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my only published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring beholders as “the author of a book you have probably not seen.” (The work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the best-intentioned loudness will not remedy.  Then, in some quarters my awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin projecting.  One can become only too well aware of such things by looking in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I have observed on