I said I would advise you not to say anything to a friend who mouths his knife, but I don't object to your looking at him when he does it. When he cuts the corners of his mouth, as he surely will, sooner or later, unless he has a practised hand, (and I _have_ witnessed feats of dexterity of this kind which would surprise you quite as much as any ever performed by the Japanese jugglers,) you might call his attention to it, and playfully add: "So much, my dear fellow, for allowing yourself to be so distracted;" and then you can tell a good story to the company about another friend of yours--clever dog he was, too--to whom the accident which has just happened to your friend opposite happened so often, and from the same unfortunate habit of having distractions at table, that he was frequently seen to rise after dinner with both corners of his mouth gashed. {127} He was cured, however, not of his distractions, but of putting his knife in his mouth at such times, by telling a joke in his presence about another individual to whom a similar accident happened under similar circumstances, and who cut himself so severely that he was obliged to be fed out of a bottle for a week. I have myself tried this friendly ruse several times, and have never known it to fail. There is another class of persons besides these who may chance to carry a longer sword than you do, about whom I would advise you, as a bit of a philosopher, not to be too meticulous; I mean those who carry a longer head than you. The pen is mightier than the sword, (quotation of school-boy memory, but good,) and cuts deeper. The writer who cut up my book so severely in the pages of _The Square Table_ was not so far wrong. But he forgot that I wrote as a professor, not as a casuist. Literary men, as well as soldiers, may do certain things with impunity which some others may not. So that Bullhead, of the _New York Sweeper_, may gnaw on his finger-nails, by way of an appetizer, between the courses, and nobody minds it--in Bullhead. He might put both of his elbows on the table, smell of the fish to find out if it be fresh, feed himself with his knife, eat as if he were doing it for a wager, wipe the perspiration from his face with his napkin, and indulge in other little eccentricities, and nobody would mind him at all, bless you! Where Bullhead is concerned, I agree with my critic of _The Square Table_. I pretend to lay down only general laws: Bullhead is a law to himself.