--I ENVY A GOOD TALKER. There is no class of persons so generally underrated and vilified, yet this would be a dull world without them. And the faculty is not to be acquired. Really good talkers are born, not made. (And some, I hear a skeptic say, are not to be borne in certain contingencies.) Talk is like a river; it rushes onward, by expression of ideas, _making room for thoughts_ to follow, and the dull elf, whose mouth is a mill-dam, finds his fancies and thoughts accumulate on his brain, till that organ is dull and sodden as is his facial aspect. Why is it that some can only be fluent from the point of a pen, while others can only address their fellows effectively by word of mouth? Of course there are conversational monsters as well as other violations of nature's creative processes. And the more thought that talk holds in solution, the more grateful the offering. But I have often listened attentively and pleasurably to an hour's flow from the lips of a pretty, graceful woman, or an interesting child, just saying enough myself to prove that sleep had not seized me. And at the subsidence of the tide, I could not for the life of me recall a single idea to which verbal embodiment had been given. Perhaps I had been carried away by the music of tone, or the charming, ever-changing curves of the opening and closing lips, or the dimples in the cheeks, as they budded, blossomed, and faded in the light of the now laughing, now languishing eyes, that never lost their hold of mine, yet never bore mine down by that most intolerable of all social manifestations--a stare. * * * * *