Besides the people who are disagreeable through malignant intention, and through deficiency of sensitiveness, there are other people who are disagreeable through pure ill-luck. It is quite certain that there are people whom evil fortune dogs through all their life, who are thoroughly and hopelessly unlucky. And in no respect have we beheld a man's ill-luck so persecute him as in the matter of making him (without the slightest evil purpose, and even when he is most anxious to render himself agreeable) render himself extremely disagreeable. Of course there must be some measure of thoughtlessness and forgetfulness,--some lack of that social caution, so indispensable in the complication of modern society, which teaches a man (so to speak) to try if the ice will bear him before venturing his entire weight upon it,--about people who are unlucky in the way of which I am speaking. But doubtless you have known persons who were always saying disagreeable things, or putting disagreeable questions,--either through forgetfulness of things which they ought to have remembered, or through unhappily chancing on forbidden ground. You will find a man, a thoughtless, but quite good-natured man, begin at a dinner-table to relate a succession of stories very much to the prejudice of somebody, while somebody's daughter is sitting opposite him. And you will find the man quite obtuse to all the hints by which the host or hostess tries to stop him, and going on to particulars worse and worse, till, in terror of what all this might grow to, the hostess has to exclaim, "Mr. Smith, you won't take a hint: _that_ is Mr. Somebody's daughter sitting opposite you." It is quite essential that any man, whose conversation consists mainly of observations not at all to the advantage of some absent acquaintance, should carefully feel his way before giving full scope to his malice and his invention, in the presence of any general company. And before making any playful reference to halters, you should be clear that you are not talking to a man whose grandfather was hanged. Nor should you venture any depreciatory remarks upon men who have risen from the ranks, unless you are tolerably versed in the family-history of those to whom you are talking. You may have heard a man very jocular upon lunatic-asylums, to another who had several brothers and sisters in one. And though in some cases human beings may render themselves disagreeable through a combination of circumstances which really absolves them from all blame, yet, as a general rule, the man who is disagreeable through ill-luck is at least guilty of culpable carelessness. * * * * *