Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite! It makes 'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the quintaan. You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck. “Ananias,” for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going to finish “Ananias,” proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies. Now you think you 've got him! Not so fast. “Ananias” keeps still and winks to “Shimei,” and “Shimei” comes out in the paper which they take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If you meddle with “Shimei,” he steps out, and next week appears “Rab-shakeh,” an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what good sense there was in Hezekiah's “Answer him not.”--No, no,--keep your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious punch with it. Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks. --Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and to live with. --There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among the men, in every denomination. --The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus: 1. The comfortably rich. 2. The decently comfortable. 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious. 4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral. --The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't clinch. --The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts. --Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people. --Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief of a large one. The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point. I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a heathen.