and, sir, now that it occurs to me, your talk, the whole of it, is but a wet sheet and a flowing sea, and an idle wind that follows fast, offering a striking contrast to my own discourse.”
“Sir,” exclaimed the man with the brass-plate, his patience now more or less tasked, “permit me with deference to hint that some of your remarks are injudiciously worded. And thus we say to our patrons, when they enter our office full of abuse of us because of some worthy boy we may have sent them—some boy wholly misjudged for the time. Yes, sir, permit me to remark that you do not sufficiently consider that, though a small man, I may have my small share of feelings.”
“Well, well, I didn’t mean to wound your feelings at all. And that they are small, very small, I take your word for it. Sorry, sorry. But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way. Hope you understand me. Don’t want to hurt you. All I say is, what I said in the first place, only now I swear it, that all boys are rascals.”
“Sir,” lowly replied the other, still forbearing like an old lawyer badgered in court, or else like a good-hearted simpleton, the butt of mischievous wags, “Sir, since you come back to the point, will you allow me, in my small, quiet way, to submit to you certain small, quiet views of the subject in hand?”
“Oh, yes!” with insulting indifference, rubbing his chin and looking the other way. “Oh, yes; go on.”
“Well, then, respected sir,” continued the other, now assuming as genteel an attitude as the irritating set of his pinched five-dollar suit would permit; “well, then, sir, the peculiar principles, the strictly philosophical principles, I may say,” guardedly rising in dignity, as he guardedly rose on his toes, “upon which our office is founded, has led me and my associates, in our small, quiet way, to a careful analytical study of man, conducted, too, on a quiet theory, and with an unobtrusive aim wholly our own. That theory I will not now at large set forth. But some of the discoveries resulting from it, I will, by your permission, very briefly mention; such of them, I mean, as refer to the state of boyhood scientifically viewed.”
“Then you have studied the thing? expressly studied boys, eh? Why didn’t you out with that before?”
“Sir, in my small business way, I have not conversed with so many masters, gentlemen masters, for nothing. I have been taught that in this world there is a precedence of opinions as well as of persons. You have kindly given me your views, I am now, with modesty, about to give you mine.”
“Stop flunkying—go on.”
“In the first place, sir, our theory teaches us to proceed by analogy from the physical to the moral. Are we right there, sir? Now, sir, take a young boy, a young male infant rather, a man-child in short—what sir, I respectfully ask, do you in the first place remark?”