everybody as to him. Suppose everybody did as he does. Imagine, for
instance, a chorus of grumble from ten people at a breakfast-table, all
saying at once, or immediately after each other, "This coffee is not fit
to drink." "Really, the attendance in this house is insufferably poor." I
have sometimes wished to try this homoeopathic treatment in a bad case of
grumble. It sounds as if it might work a cure.

If you lose your temper with the grumbler, and turn upon him suddenly,
saying, "Oh, do not spoil all our pleasure. Do make the best of things:
or, at least, keep quiet!" then how aggrieved he is! how unjust he thinks
you are to "make a personal matter of it"! "You do not, surely, suppose I
think you are responsible for it, do you?" he says, with a lofty air of
astonishment at your unreasonable sensitiveness. Of course, we do not
suppose he thinks we are to blame; we do not take him to be a fool as well
as a grumbler. But he speaks to us, at us, before us, about the cause of
his discomfort, whatever it may be, precisely as he would if we were to
blame; and that is one thing which makes his grumbling so insufferable.
But this he can never be made to see. And the worst of it is that
grumbling is contagious. If we live with him, we shall, sooner or later,
in spite of our dislike of his ways, fall into them; even sinking so low,
perhaps, before the end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining of
butter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest deep of vulgarity of
grumbling. There is no help for this; I have seen it again and again. I
have caught it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a thing as
a diseased animal in a herd: if he be not shut up or killed, the herd is
lost.

But the grumbler cannot be shut up or killed, since grumbling is not held
to be a proof of insanity, nor a capital offence,--more's the pity.