expression of a desire for bread and milk. The politicians and all
that class of men who have axes to grind, understand this business
very thoroughly. If a measure is to be carried through, and any
man wishes to secure votes for it, he gives a dinner. If a man
wishes for a profitable contract, he gives a dinner. If he is up
for a fat office, he gives a dinner. If it is desirable that a pair
of estranged friends be brought together, and reconciled to each
other, they are invited to a dinner. If hostile interests are to be
harmonized, and clashing measures compromised, and divergent forces
brought into parallelism, all must be effected by means of a dinner.
A good dinner produces a good mood,--at least, it produces an
impressible mood. The will relaxes wonderfully under the influence
of iced champagne, and canvas-backs are remarkable softeners of
prejudice. The daughter of Herodias took Herod at a great
disadvantage, when she came in and danced before him and his friends
at his birth-day supper, and secured the head of John the Baptist.
No one, I presume, believes that if she had undertaken to dance before
him when he was hungry, she would have had the offer of a gift equal
to the half of his kingdom. It is more than likely that, under any
other circumstances, he would have been told to "sit down and show
less." It is by means of food and drink, and various entertainments
of the senses, that moods are manufactured, and used as media of
approach to the wills which it is desirable to bend or direct.

I have found moods to be very poor tests of character. Having cut
through the crust of a most forbidding mood, produced by bodily
derangement or constant and pressing labor of the brain, I have
often found a heart full of all the sweetest and richest traits of
humanity. I have found, too, that some natures know the door that
leads through the moods of other natures. There are men who never