Let us imagine, if you please, that the toils and trampings of the day are over.  You are staying at a comfortable country-house with friends whom you like.  You have had a good day at your host’s pheasants and his rabbits.  Your shooting has been fairly accurate, not ostentatiously brilliant, but on the whole satisfactory.  You have followed out the hints given in my previous Chapters, and are consequently looked upon as a pleasant fellow, with plenty to say for himself.  After tea, in the drawing-room, you have had an hour or two for the writing of letters, which you have of course not written, for the reading of the morning papers from London which you have skimmed with a faint interest, and for the forty or eighty or one hundred and twenty winks in an armchair in front of the fire, which are by no means the least pleasant and comforting incident in the day’s programme.  You have dressed for dinner in good time; you have tied your white tie successfully “in once;” you have taken in a charming girl (ROSE LARKING, let us say) to dinner.  The dinner itself has been good, the drawing-room interlude after dinner has been pleasantly varied with music, and the ladies have, with the tact for which they are sometimes distinguished, retired early to bed-rooms, where it is believed they spend hours in the combing of their beautiful hair, and the interchange of gossip.  You are in high spirits.  You think, indeed you are sure (and again, on thinking it well over, not quite so sure), that the adorable ROSE looked kindly upon you as she said good-night, and allowed her pretty little hand to linger in your own while you assured her that to-morrow you would get for her the pinion-feather of a woodcock, or die in the attempt.  You are now arrayed in your smoking-coat (the black with the red silk-facings), and your velvet slippers with your initials worked in gold—­a birthday present from your sister.  All the rest are, each after his own fashion, similarly attired, and the whole male party is gathered together in the smoking-room.  There you sit and smoke and chat until the witching hour of night, when everybody yawns and grave men, as well as gay, go up to their beds.

Now, since you are an unassuming youngster, and anxious to learn, you ask me probably, how you are to bear yourself in this important assembly, what you are to speak about, and how?  The chief thing, I answer, is not to be a bore.  It is so easy not to be a bore if only you give a little thought to it.  Nobody wants to be a bore.  I cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his fellow-men.  And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency.  Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one’s own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them