SYMPTOMS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1795, 27 September 1888, Page 4

SYMPTOMS.

When you meet a friend about five o’clock his 5 own house, and he stand's gossiping with you at the street door, 'without knocking, take it as a symptom that you are not wanted in to dinner. . When you drop in for half-an-hour’s chat at a friend’s house in the evening and your friend looks at his watch after you have been there two hours, while his wife packs up her needlework with a yawn, observing, “ Well, I think it is time to give over for tonight,” it is an infallible symptom that you are a bore, and the sooner you export yourself the better.

If at a party you are selected to make one at a rubber of whist, it is a symptom that there are younger persons in the room whom the ladies cannot spare so well as yourself. If you are travelling outside a stage coach, and when you stop for dinner the porter brings a ladder for you to descend, consider bis civility as a decided symptom (whatever you may think of yourself), that he thinks you a gentleman who has arrived at a time of life not favorable to agility. When a shop boy importunately offers to sell you a pair of spectacles as a bargain, you may conclude it a symptom that there is something in your appearance which denotes the father of a family in spite of whatever the tailor may have done to dross you like your youngest son. If you meet a gentleman and lady, the gentleman looking vacantly serious as if thinking of nothing—the lady placidly careless, as if perfectly satisfied, depend upon it there are symptoms of their being man and wife, and that the husband has consented to a walk, though he would rather leave it alone, while the wife is pleased to find he is as attentive as ever. But when you meet a lady and gentleman in very earnest discourse — the gentleman talking much, the lady listening with downcast eyes—it is the symptom of an affair in progress which will probably end in going to church.