Then, there’s that bore whose thoughts come by freight, and the freight is always late. You know what’s coming, that is, you can imagine the way-bill, but he won’t let you help him to make better time, and runs his train of thought as if it were on a heavy grade. He starts to tell a story, blinking his red eyes, meanwhile, as if he thought that they supplied the motive power for his tongue. To make listening to him the harder, he generally tells a very old story. “One day, William Makepeace--er-er--” “Thackeray,” you say, intending to help him. Of course it is Thackeray, and he was going to tell about the novelist and the Bowery boy; but he is so pig-headed that he shifts on to another track. “No; Dickens, Charles Dickens. One day, when Charles Dickens was at work on ‘Bleak’--er--er--” “‘Bleak House’?” you say. “No!” he snaps; “‘Dombey and Son.’ One day, when Charles Dickens was at work on ‘Dombey and Son,’ he was approached by his biographer, John--er--er--” “Forster?” “No; it wasn’t his biographer, either; it was Edmund Yates.” [Illustration] You now take a gleeful pleasure in seeing how hopelessly you can make him tangle himself up by the refusal of your help, but he doesn’t care. He’ll tell it in his own words, though the heavens fall and though he starts a hundred stories. “Charles Dickens had a very loud way of--er--er--” “Dressing?” “No, no! He had a loud way of talking, and he and Edmund--er--er--” “Yates?” “No, sir; Edmund Spenser.” Of course this is arrant nonsense on the face of it, but he won’t admit that he’s made pi of his story, and he goes on: “Edmund said that Charles--” “Dickens?” “No, sir; Charles Reade. Edmund said that Charles Reade thought George--er--” “Meredith?” “No; hang it all! George Eliot. He thought that George Eliot never wrote a better book than ‘Silas’--er--” “‘Marner’?” “Not at all! ‘Silas Lapham.’” Now, if you are merciful, or if you are refinedly cruel, either one, you will allow him to finish his story in peace, and, like as not, he will start all over again by saying: “I guess I inadvertently got hold of the wrong name at the beginning. It was not Dickens, as you said, but Thackeray. Thackeray was one day walking along the Bowery when he met a typical--” And so on to the bitter end. For the sake of speed, do not ever interrupt his kind! XXV THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC I met a prominent literary critic the other evening. A review signed with his name or even with his initials is apt to make or mar the work treated therein. Now, I have not a little hypnotic power, and the mischievous idea came into my head to hypnotize him and make him “confess.” We were sitting in the reading-room of an up-town club. I led the conversation to the subject of hypnotism, and soon gained the critic’s consent to be put into a trance. I did not influence him any more than to put his mind in the attitude of truthfully answering what questions I might ask him.