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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