of war. Each did this to show that the
hand was empty, and that neither war nor
treachery was intended. A man cannot
vell stab another while he is engaged in
the act of shaking hands with him, unless
he be a double-dyed traitor and villain,
and strives to aim a cowardly blow with
the left, while giving the right and
pretending to be on good terms with his
victim. The custom, of hand-shaking
prevails, more or less, among all civilised
nations, and is the tacit avowal of friendship
and goodwill, just as the kiss is of a
warmer passion.

Ladies, as every one must have remarked,
seldom or never shake hands with the
cordiality of gentlemen; unless it be with each
other. The reason is obvious. It is for
them to receive homage, not to give it.
They cannot be expected to show to persons
of the other sex a warmth of greeting,
which might be misinterpreted; unless
such persons are very closely related to
them by family, or affection; in which cases
hand-shaking is not needed, and the lips
do more agreeable duty.

Every man shakes hands according to
his nature, whether it be timid or aggressive,
proud or humble, courteous or churlish,
vulgar or refined, sincere or hypocritical,
enthusiastic or indifferent. The nicest
refinements and idiosyncrasies of character
may not perhaps be discoverable in this
fashion, but the more salient points of
temperament and individuality may doubtless
be made clear to the understanding of most
people by a better study of what I shall
call the physiology or the philosophy of
hand-shaking.

Some people are too "robustious" to be
altogether pleasant. They take the offered
hand with the grasp of a vice, and as if
they had, with malice prepense, resolved to
squeeze all the delicate little bones of your
knuckles into pulp or mince meat. And
while the tears of agony come into your
eyes, and run down your cheeks, they
smile at you benignantly, like gentle giants,
unconscious of their strength, and of
the tyranny with which they exercise it.
Many of them are truly good fellows, and
mean all the cordiality of which their awful
squeeze is the manifestation. They would
exert all the strength that goes to waste in
such hand-shaking in rescuing you from
danger, if you were in it, or in doing battle
against your enemies, if you were assailed
by superior numbers. Yet when such
seemingly cordial good fellows manifest
the same cordiality towards people whom
they met for the first time yesterday, and
towards those with whom they may have
been intimate for a half or a quarter of a
century, it is impossible to avoid a suspicion
that they act from habit, rather than
from the ebullition of heart. But of all the
men to be avoided, he who squeezes your
hand in this excruciating fashion, on a
false pretence, is the worst. He dislocates
your joints to convince you that
he loves you very dearly, and as soon as
you are out of sight forgets you, or
thinks that you are no "great shakes" after
all, or, worse still, abuses you behind your
back to the next acquaintance whom he
meets. Him, in his turn, he serves in the
same manner, and gradually establishes for
himself the character, which he well
deserves, of being a snob and a humbug of a
particularly offensive type.

Another, and even more odious kind of
hand-shaker, is he who offers you his hand,
but will not permit you to get fair hold of
it; one of whom it has been sung:

With finder tip he condescends
To touch the fingers of his friends,
As if he feared their palms might brand
Some moral stigma on his hand.

To be treated with the cool contempt, or
supercilious scorn which such a mode of
salutation implies, is worse than not to be
saluted at all. Better a foeman, with
whom you feel on terms of equality, than
an acquaintance- he cannot be called a
friend—who looks down upon you as if he
were a superior being, and will not admit
your social equality without a drawback
and a discount. It sometimes happens,
however, that this result is due to the
diffidence of the shakee rather than to the
pride of the shaker. If a timid man will
not hold his hand out far enough to enable
another to grasp it fairly, it is his own
fault, and betrays a weakness in his own
character, and not a defect in that of him
who would be friendly with him.

Another hand-shaker whose method is
intolerable, and with whom it is next to
impossible to remain on friendly terms, is
the one who offers you one finger instead
of tlie tips of the whole five, as much as to
say, I am either too pre-occupied in myself,
or think too little of you, to give you my
whole hand. With such a man the interchange
of any but the barest and scantiest
courtesy is rendered difficult by any one
who has a particle of self-respect.

To present the left hand for the purpose
of a friendly greeting is a piece of
discourtesy—sometimes intentional on the