that tells lies.  Now you think you’ve got him!  Not so fast.  “Ananias” keeps still and winks to “Shimei,” and “Shimei” comes out in the paper which they take in your neighbor’s kitchen, ten times worse than t’other fellow.  If you meddle with “Shimei,” he steps out, and next week appears “Rab-shakeh,” an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what good sense there was in Hezekiah’s “Answer him not.”—­No, no,—­keep your temper.—­So saying, the little gentleman doubled his left fist and looked at it, as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious punch with it.

Good!—­said I.—­Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.

——­Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and to live with.

——­There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among the men, in every denomination.

——­The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:—­

1.  The comfortably rich.

2.  The decently comfortable.

3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.

4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.

——­The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won’t clinch.

——­The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were two:  the blood in men’s veins, and the milk in women’s breasts.

——­Humility is the first of the virtues—­for other people.

——­Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief, of a large one.

The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.

I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don’t see that you are any better than a heathen.

I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,—­I said.—­Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for it; and, the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood’s sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy’s camp, or that old New England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in his own town, going “roaring out of one fire into another”?

I don’t believe he said any such thing,—­replied the Poor Relation.

It is hard to believe,—­said I,—­but it is true for all that.  In another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we sometimes hear them now.