enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides
he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed:
he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops,
never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it
to exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
him susceptible. Headache threatened--and to him of all men! But was
there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium? Puzzles are presented
to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are
the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes,
they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the
less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we,
and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness.
Or does this happen to us only after a fall?

He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge,
of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his affability,
his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the
reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and accustomed to
receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a hint to bring
on him the charge of punctilio?

'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
fixing a button of his coat.