friends; never mind who they were; perhaps
one of them was myself, perhaps not; the
personality can interest no one. Well, these
friends were very dear; they had stood shoulder
to shoulder in more than one battle of life and
human difficulty, and no one thought their love
had the capacity of dissolution in it. They were
counted as entirely united as if the church had
pronounced its blessing over them, and the law
had amalgamated their lives and fortunes in one.
Their very security made them careless, and
their reliance led them into hardihood, and
hardihood turned to danger, and danger deepened
into ruin. What was it but the hardihood bred
of security over-sure, that suffered a third person
to come within the charmed circle, and imperil
the sweet harmonies which had so long made
that pleasant way of human going, like a pathway
through the garden of Eden? Had they feared
more, they would have guarded closer; and had
they allowed for the power of failing, they would
have cared for the continuance of holding. A
busy tongue which spared no one, wove subtle
meshes of doubt and intrigue and falsehood
round them: meshes so perseveringly and so
subtilely woven, that at last the strong heart of
faith was captured, and the poisonous seeds of
distrust were sown over the pathway of their love.
At first indignant denial; then wounded surprise
that such things could be held in any manner
worthy of discussion or refutation; then the
coldness of pain; then the bitterness of death
creeping in between them, and chilling them to
the heart for ever. The bitterness of death
indeed!—their love never rising up into life
from that terrible bier of misunderstanding
again: all to have been prevented by a frank
facing of the danger, and an analysis of what
was truth and what was falsehood in the tangled
tissues that enveloped them. Ah me! If they
had but spoken out and freely! If they had but
believed in the gold of speech and the leaden
dulness of silence!

There is the proud and yet sensitive man who,
with a facile heart and a horror of scenes, nine
times out of ten wraps himself round in a mantle
of unusual reserve and coldness, simply to hide
the weakness which he could not subdue if once
he gave it its head. Yet he gets the character
of being a cross-grained unfeeling old cynic,
selfish, perhaps, and stingy, when all the while
his soul is melting with tenderness, and his
heart swelling with sympathy. He is one of
the misunderstood of life; one of the coarser
clay images with a gracious deity indwelling;
but he has buttoned down the hasp so tightly
that very few are able to lift it from the lock,
and see the form of the god within. What
wonder, then, if the coarse clay image be
accepted in its integrity, and the hidden divine
not even suspected? This is the man who,
when asked a favour, grants it with so much
apparent surliness that he destroys half the
value of his boon. He is not surly at all; he
is only afraid of showing too plainly that he
feels for your necessities and is glad to relieve
them. He will scold a beggar roundly, but his
eyes are more tender than his words, and his
hand more liberal than his tongue: he speaks
harshly to his little daughter, in the time of
reproof for wrong doing, but he has to restrain
himself not to catch her in his arms, and tell
her that he forgives her, and that her sin was
but a feather's weight in the scale of human
wrong, and entreat her to be happy again, kissing
away her tears. His little daughter sees
nothing of this. She only cries, and tells her
younger brother in confidence that "Papa is so
cross and angry, and has scolded her so hard,"
and mamma, who is no keener sighted than the
rest, lectures him with dignity on the sinfulness
of over-severity, and how parental love ought to
temper even parental justice. Do you think the
poor fellow has no grief at this life-long
misunderstanding of his true self? Do you think
he does not read Andersen's tales with secret
meaning, meditating mournfully on the moral
contained in the barn-yard trials and sorrows of
the Ugly Duck? Only that with him, poor
wretch, the time of swanhood will never arrive
in this life; if ever he emerge—or when he
emerges rather—from this body of disfavour, it
will be with wings borrowed from God's angels.

Another clay image, whose inability to articulate
makes him sorely misunderstood, is the
humorous man of ungainly bearing—the man
whose playfulness is grotesque, and whose
liveliness is elephantine, who flounders when he
means to skip, and comes down upon all your
corns when he only wishes to cut an aile de pigeon
merrily; the man who insults you when he
wants to be funny, and whom you knock down
unavoidably—being but a weak son of Adam
in your own flesh—whenever he attempts to
pass a joke upon you. Our poor humorous
man of ungainly bearing goes through life in a
sadly Ishmaelitish way; so far, at least, as the
fact of every man's hand being against him,
though, poor soul! his is against no one. But
what can be done? In that suggestive history
of the lapdog and the donkey, where the smaller
beast got love and caresses and pleasant bits of
sugar and dainty strokings of his blunt black
nose, the bigger brute got only thumps on his
hard hide, and twitchings of his long ears, and
angry upheavings of voice and limbs, and a
passionate disclaimer of his attempted demonstrations.
Our friend, cutting ailes de pigeon as an
elephant or bear might, is the donkey of the
fable. What you will bear with smiles and
pleasantness and waggings of your russet beard,
from that smart little fencer who tips his rapier
with a diamond point that flashes more than it
wounds, and who pinks you so lightly in your
sword-arm with a grace that is irresistible, you
receive with very different manifestations. When
the pretended feint is a clumsy blow that sends
you sprawling, and when the diamond-pointed
rapier is exchanged for a gnarled and knotted
bludgeon, used to show how dexterously that
gadfly can be switched off your nose, what can
you do, but knock the poor donkey down, and
use his own bludgeon about his own ears?

As a lover, the awkward man of tender