Terpsichore was frightened and began to cry. Augustus, to reässure her, put his arm around her waist. At this, the senior Mrs. Pompadour sprang up, and seized her husband by the arm, so energetically that it made him wince. Pointing to the tell-tale ring with a gesture worthy of Ristori, she managed to articulate: "Don't you see it? That undutiful girl has married Augustus, and—and he has married her!"
Mr. Pompadour "saw it," and uttered some words which were not a blessing.
THE PROPER USE OF GRANDFATHERS.
[The Proper use of Grandfathers.]
IF people without grandfathers are in need of any particular solace, they may find it in the fact that those cumbrous contingencies of existence cannot be continually stuck in their faces. A wise man has remarked, that the moderns are pigmies standing upon the shoulders of giants. He would have been wiser still, had he observed how frequently the giants change places with the pigmies, and ride them to death like Old Men of the Sea. If, at sixteen, I have the dyspepsia and a tendency to reflect on the problems of my being, I am begged to notice that, at a corresponding period old Jones, of the alternate generation, was gambolling o'er the dewy meads, a gleesome boy. If my baby cries and is puny at teething-time, the oracles, with an intuitive perception how my grandfather behaved a hundred years before they were born, tell me it was not so in his day; that heaven lay about him in his infancy; but that none of the article exists either in that loose condition or otherwise for the immature human animal who breaks out of darkness and mystery into this day of gum-rings. If the tremendous pace at which the modern world is going knocks me up at forty, and compels me to keep my stall for a year of valetudinarianism, I am asked to remember what a hale old fellow the same inevitable ancestor was at ninety; I am inundated with his exuberance of spirits, overwhelmed with the statistics of his teeth; and invited in the mind's eye (in my own, too, if I know myself!) to take six-mile walks with him before breakfast unassisted by a cane. It is not a pleasant state of mind to be disgusted with one's forefathers, who would, probably have been very jolly fellows to know, and not the least in the world like the people who are all the time boring us about them. If there is truth in spiritualism, a delegation from those fine old boys will, some of these days, take advantage of a sitting, and rap out an indignant disclaimer of the bosh that is talked in their name. If my grandfather was not a much more unpleasant person than myself, he would scorn to be made a boguey of for the annoyance of his own flesh and blood. Any man of well-regulated mind must prefer utter oblivion among his descendants to such perpetuation as that of Mr. Wilfer.