you are left in a room with him, if you pass him in the hall, if you are confronted with him in the portico, you perceive that his effort is immediately to spare you a possibly offensive realization of his presence. He has been taught that at such times he is uncomfortable to you--that you don't, mentally as it were, know what to do with him. His place in the universe is to answer your bell, and from your point of view he should only exist by intermission. He has been trained to adapt himself to this point of view, and he does so with remarkable success. He not only rigidly abstains from bidding you good-morning, but he abstains equally from responding to the good-morning which in a moment of culpable inconsistency you may have offered him. A couple of months since, paying a visit to a friend in the country, I drove to the door with a gentleman whom I had met at the station, and who was engaged in the same pleasant errand as myself. The butler who admitted us stood motionless and inarticulate as we crossed the threshold, with his eyes, in the manner of butlers, fixed upon our boots. He was a very admirable servant, and having, in the course of twenty-four hours, taken the measure of this fact, I on the following day called my companion's attention to it. My companion was an Englishman, but he was young and perhaps foolishly sentimental. "Oh yes, he's an excellent servant," he said, "but he might give one a faint sign of recognition when one arrives."--"You had seen him, then," I asked, "before?"--"I have stayed in the house half a dozen times, and half a dozen times on departing I have given him the sidelong tip; yet whenever I arrive he gives me a stony stare, as if I were a perfect stranger." But the stony stare, for butlers, is not simply the English custom: I think it may be said that it is the English ideal.