--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially. I
won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in company
with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of the same
kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain,
that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact
which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as
receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.
If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good
story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to
the fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
of the "Old Sailor" says. I had rather hear one of those grand elemental
laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names, Sir or Madam,)
glisten to one of those old playbills of our College days, in which "Tom
and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to
call it) was announced to be brought on the stage with whole force of the
Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no such person, of course,) than say the
best things I might by any chance find myself capable of saying.
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