I will tell you my wicked, but half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded bombazine.
Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch the infirm spot?
I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this thing.

If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.
If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him, limping.
I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"-- which I use rarely in my common talk.
I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not answerable.

It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.

A thin film of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought from the stream of conversation.

After a time one begins to soak through and mingle with the other.
We were talking about names, one day .-- Was there ever anything,--I said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious, detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time of Praise-God Barebones?
I heard a country-boy once talking of another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.