Apollo prefers friends who can stand grief and annoyance, as a rhinoceros can stand flies—friends who can bear their own troubles and all his—friends who will stand between him and everything disagreeable in life, and never ask anything in return. To such friends he clings with the most touching tenacity—as long as he can use them; but let their good name be assailed, let misfortune once overtake them, and his “moral excellence” compels him, at once, to ignore their existence, until they have been extricated from all their troubles, and it has become perfectly safe and advantageous for him to renew the acquaintance.
Apollo is keenly alive to the advantages of social position, (not having always enjoyed them;) and so, his Litany reads after this wise: From all questionable, unfashionable, unpresentable, and vulgar persons, Good Lord, deliver us!
SPOILED LITTLE BOY.
“Boo-hoo!—I’ve eaten so—m-much bee-eef and t-turkey, that I can’t eat any p-p-plum p-p-pudding!”
Miserable little Pitcher! Take your fists out of your eyes, and know that thousands of grown-up pinafore graduates, are in the same Slough of Despond with your epicurean Lilliputian-ship. Having washed the platter clean of every crumb of “common fixins,” they are left with cloyed, but tantalizing desires, for the spectacle of some mocking “plum pudding.”
“Can’t eat your pudding!”
Why, you precious, graceless young glutton! you have the start of me, by many an ache-r. I expect to furnish an appetite for every “plum pudding” the fates are kind enough to cook for me, from this time till Teba Napoleon writes my epitaph.
Infatuated little Pitcher! come sit on my knee, and take a little advice. Don’t you know you should only take a nibble out of each dish, and be parsimonious at that; always leaving off, be the morsel ever so dainty, before your little jacket buttons begin to tighten; while from some of the dishes, you should not even lift the cover; taking aunt Fanny’s word for it, that their spicy and stimulating contents will only give you a pain under your apron. Bless your little soul, life’s “bill of fare” can be spun out as ingeniously as a cobweb, if you only understand it; and then you can sit in the corner, in good digestive order, and catch your flies! But if you once get a surfeit of a dainty, it takes the form of a pill to you, ever after, unless the knowing cuisinier disguise it under some novel process of sugaring; and sadder still, if you exhaust yourself in the gratification of gross appetites, you will be bereft of your faculties for enjoying the pure and heavenly delights which “Our Father” has provided as a dessert for his children.