varied with music, and the ladies have, with the tact for which they
are sometimes distinguished, retired early to bed-rooms, where it is
believed they spend hours in the combing of their beautiful hair, and
the interchange of gossip. You are in high spirits. You think, indeed
you are sure (and again, on thinking it well over, not quite so sure),
that the adorable ROSE looked kindly upon you as she said good-night,
and allowed her pretty little hand to linger in your own while you
assured her that to-morrow you would get for her the pinion-feather
of a woodcock, or die in the attempt. You are now arrayed in your
smoking-coat (the black with the red silk-facings), and your velvet
slippers with your initials worked in gold--a birthday present from
your sister. All the rest are, each after his own fashion, similarly
attired, and the whole male party is gathered together in the
smoking-room. There you sit and smoke and chat until the witching hour
of night, when everybody yawns and grave men, as well as gay, go up to
their beds.

Now, since you are an unassuming youngster, and anxious to learn,
you ask me probably, how you are to bear yourself in this important
assembly, what you are to speak about, and how? The chief thing, I
answer, is _not to be a bore_. It is so easy _not_ to be a bore if
only you give a little thought to it. Nobody wants to be a bore. I
cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his
fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through
the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their
dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness,
pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible
desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as
the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the
whole world in every dull detail, regardless of the right of other men