Something is always the matter, too, with the bureau when he would open or shut a drawer.—Either it will not come out or it wont go in. That drawer must take the consequences; and doors—lucky are they to escape a fractured panel, if doors prove refractory, as doors sometimes will.—Nobody can open a door so featly as a Kerr Mudgeon. “You wont, wont you?” and so he appeals to the _ultima ratio regum_—the last reasoning of Kings—which means as many of thumps, cuffs and kicks as may be requisite to the purpose. It is a knock-down argument. Pooh! pooh!—how you talk of the efficacy of the soft answer in the turning away of wrath.—Nonsense, Mr. George Combe, that wrath to the wrathful is only fuel to the flame. Mr. Kerr Mudgeon has no faith in passive resistance and in other doctrines of that sort. Smite his cheek, and then see what will come of the smitation. Go to him if you want “as good as you give,” and you will be sure to obtain measure, exact, yea, and running over. And so Mr. Kerr Mudgeon has always a large stock of quarrel on hand, unsettled and neat as imported—feuds everywhere, to keep him warm in the winter season. A good hater is Mr. Kerr Mudgeon—a bramble bush to scratch withal. “Try to impose on me,” says Kerr Mudgeon, “I’d like to see ’em at it. They’ll soon find I’m not afraid of anybody;” and he therefore seeks to impress that fact with distinctness on everybody’s mind; and, in consequence, if anybody has unexpended choler about him—a pet rage or so, pent up, or a latent exasperation—make him acquainted with Kerr Mudgeon, and observe the effect of the contact of such a spark as Mudgeon with an inflammable magazine. Should you find yourself peevish generally, and a little crusty or so, to those around you—primed, as it were, for contention, should it be fairly offered, stop as you go to business, at Kerr Mudgeon’s. He will accommodate you, and you will feel much better afterward, you will—“calm as a summer morning,” as the politicians have it. Kerr Mudgeon rides; and his horse must abide a liberal application of whip and spur, sometimes inducing it as a corollary—is a tumble to be regarded as a corollary from the saddle?—inducing it as a corollary, that Kerr Mudgeon must abide in the mire, with a fractured tibia or fibia, as the case may be. “You wont, wont you?”— and there are horses who don’t, when not able clearly to understand what is to be done. Now, the horse swerves, and Kerr Mudgeon takes the lateral slide. Again the steed bows—with politeness enough—and Kerr Mudgeon is a flying phenomenon over his head—gracefully, like a spread-eagle in a fit of enthusiasm. When he is _down_ he says he never gives _up_ to a horse.