The thing goes so far that I have occasionally mistaken my wife’s relations for old friends.  Then, when I am hostile, it is just as bad.  I never, indeed, horsewhipped the wrong man, but that is only because I never horsewhipped anybody at all, Heaven forefend!  But once I did mean to cut a man, I forget why.  So I cut the wrong man, a harmless acquaintance whose feelings I would not have hurt for the world.  Of course I accidentally cut all the world.  Some set it down to an irritable temper, and ask, “What can we have done to The MACDUFFER?” Others think I am proud.  Proud!  I ask, what has a Duffer to be proud of?  Nobody, or very few, admit that I am just a Duffer; a stupid, short-sighted, absent-minded child of misfortune.

All these things do not make my life so pleasant to me that I, the MACDUFFER, should greatly care to dine out.  Ah, that is a trial.  First, I never know my host and hostess by sight.  Next, in a summer dusk, I never know anybody.  Then, as to conversation, I have none.  My mind is always prowling about on some antiquarian hobby-horse, reflecting deeply on the Gowrie Conspiracy, or the Raid of Ruthven, or the chances in favour of PERKIN WARBECK’s having been a true man.  Now I do object to talking shop, I am not a lawyer, nor yet am I an actor; I do not like people who talk about their cases, or their parts.  It would he unbecoming to start a conversation on the authenticity of “HENRY GORING’s Letter.”  Then I never go to the play, I do not even know which of the Royal Family is which:  modern pictures are the abominations of desolation to me; in fact, I have no “conversation-openings.”  A young lady, compelled to sit beside me, has been known to hum tunes, and telegraph messages of her forlorn condition to her sister, at the opposite end of the table.  I pitied her, but was helpless.  My impression is that she was musical, poor soul!  When I do talk, things become actively intolerable.  I have no tact.  To have tact, is much like being good at Halma, or whist, or tennis, or chess.  You must be able to calculate the remote consequences of every move, and all the angles and side-walls from which the conversational hall may bound.  It is needless to say that, at whist, I never know in the least what will happen in consequence of the card I play; and life is very much too short for the interminable calculations of chess.  It is the same in conversation.  I never know, or, if my sub-consciousness knows, I never remember, who anybody is.  I speak to people about scandals with which they are connected.  I frankly give my mind about Mr. DULL’s poems to Mr. DULL’s sister-in-law.  I give free play to my humour about the Royal Academy in talk with the wife of an Academician of whom I never heard.  I am like Jeanie Deans, at her interview with Queen CAROLINE, when, as the MACALLUM MORE said, she first brought down the Queen, and then Lady SUFFOLK, right and left, with remarks about unkind mothers, and the Stool of Penitence.