especially if any of them betray sentiments which would not bear rough
handling.

I don't doubt that the different personalities at our table will get
mixed up in the reader's mind if he is not particularly clear-headed.
That happens very often, much oftener than all would be willing to
confess, in reading novels and plays. I am afraid we should get a good
deal confused even in reading our Shakespeare if we did not look back now
and then at the dramatis personae. I am sure that I am very apt to
confound the characters in a moderately interesting novel; indeed, I
suspect that the writer is often no better off than the reader in the
dreary middle of the story, when his characters have all made their
appearance, and before they have reached near enough to the denoument to
have fixed their individuality by the position they have arrived at in
the chain of the narrative.

My reader might be a little puzzled when he read that Number Five did or
said such or such a thing, and ask, "Whom do you mean by that title? I
am not quite sure that I remember." Just associate her with that line of
Emerson,

"Why nature loves the number five,"

and that will remind you that she is the favorite of our table.

You cannot forget who Number Seven is if I inform you that he specially
prides himself on being a seventh son of a seventh son. The fact of such
a descent is supposed to carry wonderful endowments with it. Number
Seven passes for a natural healer. He is looked upon as a kind of
wizard, and is lucky in living in the nineteenth century instead of the