Smith,
permit me to feel Mr. Jones."
Let not my Reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us
the tedious process that it would be with you, or that we find
it necessary to feel right round all the sides of every individual
before we determine the class to which he belongs. Long practice
and training, begun in the schools and continued in the experience
of daily life, enable us to discriminate at once by the sense of touch,
between the angles of an equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon;
and I need not say that the brainless vertex of an acute-angled
Isosceles is obvious to the dullest touch. It is therefore
not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel a single angle
of an individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us the class
of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to the
higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much greater.
Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge has been known
to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and there is hardly
a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University who could
pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty-sided
and a twenty-four sided member of the Aristocracy.
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