There is a habit peculiar to many walkers, which Punch, some years ago, touched upon satirically, but which seems to have survived the jester’s ridicule.  It is that custom of stopping friends in the street, to whom we have nothing whatever to communicate, but whom we embarrass for no other purpose than simply to show our friendship.  Jones meets his friend Smith, whom he has met in nearly the same locality but a few hours before.  During that interval, it is highly probable that no event of any importance to Smith, nor indeed to Jones, which by a friendly construction Jones could imagine Smith to be interested in, has occurred, or is likely to occur.  Yet both gentlemen stop and shake hands earnestly.  “Well, how goes it?” remarks Smith with a vague hope that something may have happened.  “So so,” replies the eloquent Jones, feeling intuitively the deep vacuity of his friend answering to his own.  A pause ensues, in which both gentlemen regard each other with an imbecile smile and a fervent pressure of the hand.  Smith draws a long breath and looks up the street; Jones sighs heavily and gazes down the street.  Another pause, in which both gentlemen disengage their respective hands and glance anxiously around for some conventional avenue of escape.  Finally, Smith (with a sudden assumption of having forgotten an important engagement) ejaculates, “Well, I must be off”—­a remark instantly echoed by the voluble Jones, and these gentlemen separate, only to repeat their miserable formula the next day.  In the above example I have compassionately shortened the usual leave-taking, which, in skilful hands, may be protracted to a length which I shudder to recall.  I have sometimes, when an active participant in these atrocious transactions, lingered in the hope of saying something natural to my friend (feeling that he, too, was groping in the mazy labyrinths of his mind for a like expression), until I have felt that we ought to have been separated by a policeman.  It is astonishing how far the most wretched joke will go in these emergencies, and how it will, as it were, convulsively detach the two cohering particles.  I have laughed (albeit hysterically) at some witticism under cover of which I escaped, that five minutes afterward I could not perceive possessed a grain of humor.  I would advise any person who may fall into this pitiable strait, that, next to getting in the way of a passing dray and being forcibly disconnected, a joke is the most efficacious.  A foreign phrase often may be tried with success; I have sometimes known Au revoir pronounced “O-reveer,” to have the effect (as it ought) of severing friends.