“My dear John!  This is the third week in January, and you went to New York immediately after Christmas.”

When you hear your friend tell your favorite story, and change some minor detail, she will love you not a whit the more if you correct her with—­

“No, Mary! the way it happened was this”—­and then proceed with the tale in the manner which you consider best.

There are so many things which we all do for which there is no honest reason, that I will mention only one more.  That is the exceedingly uncomfortable trick of reminding a man of something he has once said, when he has since had occasion to change his mind.  Perhaps some years ago when you first met your now dear friend, you thought her manner affected, and did not hesitate to mention the fact to your family.  Since then you have become so well acquainted with her delightful points that you forget your early impression of her.  How do you feel when you are enthusiastically enumerating her many lovable attributes, if the member of the household with the fiendish memory strikes in with—­

“Oh, then you have changed your mind about her?  You remember you once said that you considered her the most affected mortal whom you had ever met.”

Under such provocation does not murder assume the guise of justifiable homicide?

There is no more bitter diet than to be forced to eat one’s own words.  Never tell one of an opinion which he once held, if he has since had reason to alter his views.  There is no sin or weakness in changing one’s mind.  It is a thing which all of us—­if we except a few victims to pig-headed prejudice—­do daily.  And, as a rule, we hate to be reminded of the fact.  Then why call the attention of others to the circumstances that they are guilty of the same weakness, if such it be?  Again I ask, cui bono?

CHAPTER IX.

SHALL, I PASS IT ON?

“Me refrunce, mum!”

I look up, bewildered, from an essay to which I have just set the caption—­“Who is my Neighbor?”

“Me carackter, mum!  Me stiffticket!  You’ll not be sending me away without one, peticklerly as ’twas meself as give warnin’?”

She is ready for departure.  Dressed in decent black for the brother “who was drownded las’ summer,” she stands at the back of my desk, one hand on her hip, and makes her demand.  It is not a petition, but a dispassionate statement of a case that has no other side.

She has been in my kitchen for six months as my nominal servitor.  She has drawn her wages punctually for that time.  She “wants a change;” her month is up; she is going out of my house, out of my employ, out of my life.  These things being true, Katy wants to take with her all that pertains to her.  One of these belongings is her “refrunce.”  From her standpoint, I owe it to her as truly as I owed the sixteen dollars I have just paid her.