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Side 31 av 112
I am always a little uneasy in a discourse with the Reverend
Bellicosus Macduff. It is like playing golf on links liable to
earthquakes. One never knows when the landscape will be thrown into
convulsions. Macduff has a tendency to regard a difference of
opinion as a personal insult. If he makes a bad stroke he seems to
think that the way to retrieve it is to deliver the next one on the
head of the other player. He does not tarry for the invitation to
lay on; and before you know what has happened you find yourself in a
position where you are obliged to cry, "Hold, enough!" and to be
liberally damned without any bargain to that effect. This is
discouraging, and calculated to make one wish that human intercourse
might be put, as far as Macduff is concerned, upon the gold basis of
silence.
On the other hand, what a delight it was to talk with that old
worthy, Chancellor Howard Crosby. He was a fighting man for four or
five generations hack, Dutch on one side, English on the other. But
there was not one little drop of gall in his blood. His opinions
were fixed to a degree; he loved to do battle for them; he never
changed them--at least never in the course of the same discussion.
He admired and respected a gallant adversary, and urged him on, with
quips and puns and daring assaults and unqualified statements, to do
his best. Easy victories were not to his taste. Even if he joined
with you in laying out some common falsehood for burial, you might
be sure that before the affair was concluded there would be every
prospect of what an Irishman would call "an elegant wake." If you
stood up against him on one of his favorite subjects of discussion
you must be prepared for hot work. You would have to take off your
coat. But when the combat was over he would be the man to help you
on with it again; and you would walk home together arm in arm,
through the twilight, smoking the pipe of peace. Talk like that
does good. It quickens the beating of the heart, and leaves no
scars upon it.
But this manly spirit, which loves
"To drink delight of battle with its peers,"
is a very different thing from that mean, bad, hostile temper which
loves to inflict wounds and injuries just for the sake of showing
power, and which is never so happy as when it is making some one
wince. There are such people in the world, and sometimes their
brilliancy tempts us to forget their malignancy. But to have much
converse with them is as if we should make playmates of rattlesnakes
for their grace of movement and swiftness of stroke.
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