Poor Mr. Parasite is very much beset! Every hour in the day somebody wants something that somebody believes is in Mr. Parasite’s power to bestow. It may be flattering, but it is also wearing, tearing, exasperating, and even maddening, sometimes, to a man to be deemed the dispenser of so much power and patronage. He cannot give everybody all that everybody may ask—of course not. This is not all his sin. His sin is this: He comes in time (usually in a marvellously short time) to regard every one seeking the patronage of his office as a mendicant on his personal bounty, rather than as a member of one class with himself. Because he gained the highest honor, he forgets that he got it on the very same principle that John Jones, who, armed with credentials from his minister and doctor, so humbly sues for the post-office of Mudtown. He listens to the sister pleading for her brother, the wife for her husband, the father for his son, the poor man for himself, and because it is little each asks, despises each accordingly, lectures each on the folly of wanting any Government place whatever. The one thing that he cannot remember, and which it is most delightful to forget, is that he was ever in John Jones’ place himself. To be sure, he did not sue for the Mudtown post-office. He wanted a foreign ministry, a home secretaryship, to be a Senator, or, at least, a Governor. He begged or bartered for these Government-gifts precisely as John does for his post-office. Both are equally office-seekers; but there is such disparity between John’s little Alpha and the Omega of Mr. Parasite’s desires, the latter does not recognize in this seeker of small things his remotest cousin. Comparatively few dare demand ministries and secretaryships, while post-offices and their ilk are as plentiful as blackberries, and their pickers equally so—so plentiful that Mr. Parasite leans back in his cushioned chair, on his official tripod, and wonders _which_ John Jones it will be next, and what _he_ will want; and, when one of the innumerable Johns, waiting outside, is admitted by a mighty messenger, whose official state is more overwhelming even than his master’s, the suppliant quakes to the bottom of his boots in the presence of the powerful potentate, Mr. Parasite. “What do _you_ want?” says the potentate, in a tone which implies in advance, “You can’t have it.” “Only the Mudtown post-office,” says John, “or—or anything that I can get.” “Impossible; I have nothing—nothing for you,” says the potentate, in a remote and superior tone, which indicates, as only a tone can, that he, the potentate, needs nothing at present himself. And who can imagine that he ever did? “Why on earth do so many of you come for Government employment? Don’t you know it is the worst thing in the world for you? You had better go to work. Do anything, rather than to hang upon the Government.”