effect upon the whole company. After hearing him talk a little while, I
find tears standing in my eyes without any sufficient reason. It is almost
as good as a sermon to see him wipe his mouth with a napkin. I would not
want him all alone to tea, because it would be making a meal of sweetmeats.
But when he is present with others of different temperament, he is
entertaining. He always reminds me of the dessert called floating island,
beaten egg on custard. On all subjects--political, social and religious--he
takes the smooth side. He is a minister, and preached a course of fifty-one
sermons on heaven in one year, saying that he would preach on the last and
fifty-second Sunday concerning a place of quite opposite character; but the
audience assembling on that day, in August, he rose and said that it was
too hot to preach, and so dismissed them immediately with a benediction. At
the tea-table I never could persuade him to take any currant-jelly, for he
always preferred strawberry-jam. He rejects acidity.

We generally place opposite him at the tea-table Mr. Givemfits. He is the
very antipodes of Dr. Butterfield; and when the two talk, you get both
sides of a subject. I have to laugh to hear them talk; and my little girl,
at the controversial collisions, gets into such hysterics that we have to
send her with her mouth full into the next room, to be pounded on the back
to stop her from choking. My friend Givemfits is "down on" almost
everything but tea, and I think one reason of his nervous, sharp, petulant
way is that he takes too much of this beverage. He thinks the world is very
soon coming to an end, and says, "The sooner the better, confound it!" He
is a literary man, a newspaper writer, a book critic, and so on; but if he
were a minister, he would preach a course of fifty-one sermons on "future
punishment," proposing to preach the fifty-second and last Sabbath on
"future rewards;" but the last Sabbath, coming in December, he would say to
his audience, "Really, it is too cold to preach. We will close with the
doxology and omit the benediction, as I must go down by the stove to warm."