Right, Sir! right!—­said Little Boston.—­The scamps!  I know the fellows.  They can’t give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they must have it jingled along through everybody’s palms all the way, till it reaches him,—­and forty cents of it get spilt, like the water out of the fire-buckets passed along a “lane” at a fire;—­but, when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people’s mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the authors of them,—­oh, then it is that they let not their left hand know what their right hand doeth!

I don’t like Ehud’s style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his “secret errand unto thee,” and his “message from God unto thee,” and then pulls out his hidden knife with that unsuspected left hand of his,—­(the little gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)—­and runs it, blade and haft, into a man’s stomach!  Don’t meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.  Let ’em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath contempt.

I hope so,—­I said.—­I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from one young mother’s chamber to another’s,—­for doing which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should ever come of my life,—­I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.—­What would you do, if the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?—­Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?

Let ’em bite!—­said Little Boston;—­let ’em bite!  It makes ’em hungry to shake ’em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call ’em, is like?—­It is like riding at the quintain.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  “Ananias,” for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going to finish “Ananias,” proving him a booby who doesn’t know enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person