Observe that man sitting in the private room of one of our largest mercantile establishments. Risen from a low grade to the direction of a vast concern, at one time intrusted with a mission abroad of a most important yet delicate character, he owes the eminence he has attained entirely to tact. The features are now in repose, take your opportunity to watch them (for they are seldom so, and if he were aware of observation, would assume a different expression); how the wear upon nerves, even of such flexibility, imparts to the fatigued countenance an air of study, ceaseless even in comparative inaction. The open and bald forehead, clear, expansive, impending over deep-set, small, yet fathomless eyes, restless and anxious in their motion; the lips fullish, wearing at the corner a half-contemptuous yet good-humored self-contentment, which tells of the owner's disdain for the game of life, and yet of triumphant complacency at his own successful skill in it. He smiles! Ah! he is thinking of how he deluded that shallow fop, Lord F----, whom fortune raised kindly to conceal his puerilites by a coronet; or perhaps (as his eye dilates with haughtier gaze) he dreams of having struck a nobler quarry, when he outwitted the subtle Count de P----; for neither thought they were following aught but the suggestion of their own will. This is the mystery and mastery of tact. Had his victims seen that smile, the game would have been lost; but he was different to each, the man was changed. The lordling saw before him a free hearty abettor of youthful folly, an Apicius, not a Mentor, one versed in life's vanities, yet still ready to quaff the draught he satirized; sagacious in criticising pleasure, yet reckless as the youngest in its pursuit; but to the Count, the deferential air, the silent evidence of every action, so sedulously courteous, yet so artless, attesting the listener's (for he spoke but to inquire as if of an oracle, and demurred but to render conviction more gracefully attractive) reverence for the old diplomatist's sagacity; the rejoinder dexterously introduced to confirm confidence in his visitor that he was not wasting his instruction,--these and the thousand nameless points of tact, dipped in the fountain of his own deep counsel, instilled the wary practiser's motives into the mind of one, apparently his confessed master in the art of diplomacy, convinced the Count that he was regarded as the condensation of profound thought, of astute sagacity; and it so happened, that if there was one qualification in which the foreigner especially exulted more than any other, it was upon his dexterity in deciphering disposition--in his thorough knowledge of human nature!