What a wonderful and beautiful provision of nature it has been that, for the most part, our womankind are not endowed with the faculty of finding us out!  They don’t doubt, and probe, and weigh, and take your measure.  Lay down this paper, my benevolent friend and reader, go into your drawing-room now, and utter a joke ever so old, and I wager sixpence the ladies there will all begin to laugh.  Go to Brown’s house, and tell Mrs. Brown and the young ladies what you think of him, and see what a welcome you will get!  In like manner, let him come to your house, and tell your good lady his candid opinion of you, and fancy how she will receive him!  Would you have your wife and children know you exactly for what you are, and esteem you precisely at your worth?  If so, my friend, you will live in a dreary house, and you will have but a chilly fireside.  Do you suppose the people round it don’t see your homely face as under a glamour, and, as it were, with a halo of love round it?  You don’t fancy you are as you seem to them?  No such thing, my man.  Put away that monstrous conceit, and be thankful that they have not found you out.

The Notch on the Ax

A Story a la Mode*

* (Here Thackeray reduces to an absurdity the literary fashion of the day—­the vogue for startling stories and “Tales of Terror,” which was high in his time, and which influenced several of the stories which precede in this volume.  But while Dickens made fun, with mental reservations; while Bulwer Lytton tried to explain by rising to the heights of natural philosophy, and Maturin did not explain at all, but let his extravagant genius roam between heaven and earth—­Thackeray’s keen wit saw mainly one chance for exquisite literary satire and parody.  At one point or another in this skit, the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.—­Editor.)

I

Every one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were apparent, and Visions Celestial), how Adam discourses to Eve of the Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden—­

     ’Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
      Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’

“‘How often,’ says Father Adam, ’from the steep of echoing hill or thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole, or responsive to each other’s notes, singing!’ After the Act of Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth—­though the Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were gone.  It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them.  In your chamber hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you