XIX.

BORES.

The Gnats and Wasps of Society - The Bore selects a Subject in which you have no Interest - How he defeats your Attempts to escape - He must be severely snubbed - Example - The Parasite The Pessimist - The Malade Imaginaire - The Man with One Idea - The Bore Epistolary - On Board Ship - In Carriages, Doorways, etc.

WHILE I protest against these railing accusations, by which certain classes of the community are consigned to transportation for life, I would as earnestly denounce, and, in each individual and convicted. case, condemn to exile or extinction, those bores, and impostors, and otherwise objectionable persons who infest and irritate society, like wasps at a picnic, or mosquitoes,

“Oft in the stilly night, ere slumber's chain has bound us,”

or gnats, when we have just made every arrangement to fish in our favourite pool. They must be annihilated (like the wasps) by the sulphurous and tormenting flames of the squib (our fiery indignation), choked (like the mosquito) by the fatal fumes of Keating's insecticide (the pungent powder of our satire), and left to themselves (like the gnats) by the process of-going elsewhere. They must be snubbed, cold-shouldered, received with one finger,

frozen to death by frigid politeness, petrified by dropping monosyllables at stated intervals, when you converse with them, they must be asked to sit upon the box with the coachman; you must not introduce them to the Duke with whom you are talking, though you notice their anxious, longing look; they must, in short, be treated like the guinea pig in "Alice in Wonderland," shut up and sat on. You must shoot at them with powder and ball: arrows break or rebound from their impenetrable self-esteem. In vain you preach to them the Wise Man's words, "Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee;" in vain you fidget and sigh. Moloch's is the only successful policy - "open war.

One would almost prefer to meet a herd of buffaloes in a blizzard than some of these stupendous bores. You feel a shrinking, a loss of vital power, as they approach. Like the rabbit, fascinated by the glittering eye of the weasel, you are powerless to escape. He gloats upon you as some famished spider upon an obese bluebottle, entangled in his mesh, and he tells you, that "you are the very man he most wished to see," just as a hawk might say in his swoop, "Of all the dear little sparrows in the universe, I love thee best."

He always chooses for his abominable and excruciating discourse some subject in which I have no interest whatever- a family quarrel, or a local meeting, his investments-or, of which I am profoundly ignorant, bimetallism, the last new thing in torpedoes, archæology. I have no taste, I have no time

for archæology. When an antiquarian wrote to ask me whether I could give him any information as to the nailing of Danish skins to the great door of the Cathedral, I was constrained to reply, that I was too much occupied with the bodies and souls of living Christians to inquire about the epidermis of the Danes. My letter, I must admit, was more curt than courteous, but when a man is overwhelmed with correspondence he is irritated by superfluous encroachments; and so I recall another more recent communication, which I wrote, in answer to a London clergyman, kindly but injudiciously complying with the request of one of his parishioners, that I would endeavour to obtain the amount of a debt due to him from a citizen of Rochester, both creditor and debtor being unknown to me, even by name

"DEAR SIR, I have received your communication of the 18th inst., and desire to inform you that I am a Dean and not a Dun.

'Faithfully yours,

"S. REYNOLDS HOLE."

Oh, that we could rid ourselves of the bore loquacious, who attacks us viva voce, as easily as of the bore epistolary, who assails us currente calamo. No, he holds you by the coat; he plays with you, as a cat with a mouse; he mouths you, and lets you go awhile, and, when you think there's an opportunity of escaping and making a movement accordingly, down comes his paw. As he goes prosing on, the brain seems to soften; as with the mouse, the position is altogether embarrassing. Our sensations

resemble those of the poultry of whom Mark Twain says, that they wandered with felonious intentions into the garden of a neighbour; that the neighbour, anticipating their visit, had placed in the middle of a large bed, in which the seed of the radish had been recently sown, a gigantic rocket, manufactured expressly for the occasion, with numerous lines and hooks, baited with moist maize, suspended; that when each uninvited guest had transferred the grain to his maw, their host applied a lighted match to his monster firework; and that when the fowls were swishing among the constellations, they began to doubt the stability of earthly things.

If you raise your hand, as though to take leave, he has "just reached a point, which concerns you personally, or on which he must have your invaluable opinion" (not to be noticed for a moment, unless it coincides with his own), and then on he goes, "and so I said to my solicitor," etc., etc., etc., and you try to solace yourself, as you accept the inevitable, with Byron's lines,

"Society is now one polished horde,

Formed of two mighty tribes, the bores and bored."

You can only deliver yourself from the Bore by fighting him with his own weapons; you must return to him a portion of the annoyance which he has so abundantly bestowed upon you.

Once upon a time I knew two young farmers, who were cousins, and who lived some six miles apart, with a large midland town between them. The one was unassuming, affectionate, attached to his home,

interested and industrious in his work. The other was proud, boastful, disobedient to his parents, disdainful to his equals, ever seeking to ingratiate himself with those whom he admired for their greater riches or higher position, as he regarded it, in the social grade, and then proclaiming his intimacy to excite, as he hoped, the envy of his neighbours. Thus he became an intolerable Bore; and on a certain afternoon, having nothing to do, or rather, if the truth be told, having plenty to do, but being too idle to do it, he mounted his horse, and inflicted himself on his kinsman for a large portion of the remaining day. He played the old tune, “See the conquering hero comes," on his own trumpet. He related how he had been shooting with the Duke of Staleybridge (forgetting to mention that he had attended in the capacity of a beater), how he and another fellow (the other fellow being the head keeper) had killed twenty brace of partridges on one of Sir Paul Piccadilly's farms, how he had lunched with Squire Buckskins (railway restaurant), and danced the Lancers with Lady Mignonette de Coverley (in the same set, he should have said), etc., etc., etc. "He bored me," to quote the words of the unhappy host, "until it was nearly dark, keeping me from my work, and bragging about himself as he smoked my cigars and drank my whiskey, and I got more and more out of temper, and finally determined to relieve my mind before he departed and to give him one for himself. And so I asked him just as he was riding away whether he knew the workshop of the cooper in the town through which he would pass. Of