I hope so,—­I said.—­I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from one young mother’s chamber to another’s,—­for doing which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should ever come of my life,—­I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.—­What would you do, if the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?—­Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?

Let ’em bite!—­said the Little Gentleman,—­let ’em bite!  It makes ’em hungry to shake ’em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call ’em, is like?—­It is like riding at the quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  “Ananias,” for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going to finish “Ananias,” proving him a booby who doesn’t know enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person 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.