‘Am I the fellow you mean, sir?’ the man said.

He was answered, not ungraciously:  ‘All right, my man.’

But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic bobbings on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall appear disdainful our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not usurped command of one of the scales:  thus a fairly pleasant answer, cast in persuasive features, provoked the retort: 

‘There you’re wrong; nor wouldn’t be.’

‘What’s that?’ was the gentleman’s musical inquiry.

‘That’s flat, as you was half a minute ago,’ the man rejoined.

‘Ah, well, don’t be impudent,’ the gentleman said, by way of amiable remonstrance before a parting.

‘And none of your dam punctilio,’ said the man.

Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the gentleman stepped forward.

It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers on the back of his head.

They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap.  But, in fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the pavement or damage to his waistcoat’s whiteness:  he abominated the thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed:  he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to exhibit the grinders:  and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered him susceptible.  Headache threatened—­and to him of all men!  But was there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium?  Puzzles are presented to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes, they are actually children’s toys, for what they contain, but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness.  Or does this happen to us only after a fall?

He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations, in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge, of all places in the world!—­he, so popular, renowned for his affability, his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and accustomed to receive their applause.  And in what way had he offered a hint to bring on him the charge of punctilio?