Never keep gnawing your mustache, twisting your whiskers into fantastic braids, nor making your hat wag about on your head through muscular contraction of the scalp.
Never crackle your knuckles with sharp reports, grit your teeth, heave deep, wheezing sighs, nor keep running your fingers through your hair till it stands up like a brush-heap. If you imagine one or all of these feats to be uniquely interesting, hire out to a dime museum.
Never take any more drinks in the early part of the day than are absolutely necessary to brace you up. Three cocktails as eye-openers, followed by two in the way of appetizers, ought to straighten you up before breakfast, and, if not already a slave to tippling, a dozen beers or so ought to satisfy you between then and noon. If tempted to overdo the matter, recall the wax group of the Drunkard’s Family in Barnum’s old museum, set the teeth hard, and shut down, shut down!
Never forget to say your prayers before going to sleep, if it is in accordance with your religious Convictions.
Never fail to have convictions of some sort. A man without any is like a cat shelling walnuts. Would you be a non-entity, a dolt, a jackass, or a gentleman of distinction, a man of parts, a power in the land?
VIII.
At Public Entertainments.
Never, if escorting one lady or several, scuffle and bandy oaths with ticket-speculators at a theater-entrance. Cultivate an easy hauteur of manner.
Never, under like environments, offer to bounce the attendant policeman, boots, blue-coat and buttons, if he will only drop his club. Your ladies may object, if the policeman does not.