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The laughter of my opponents and the gibes of my backers all tended to flurry me and lose me my head. Let me draw a veil over that scene. My opponent was not one of the sort to give quarter. He had had a blow of mine on his chin in the last round, and he had heard the laughter and cheers which greeted it. It was his turn now, and he took his turn as long as I could stand up before him.
The troops felt that their long and weary marches, hard fighting, ceaseless watching by night and day, in a hot climate, exposure to all sorts of weather, to diseases and, worst of all, to the gibes of many Northern papers that came to them saying all their suffering was in vain, that Vicksburg would never be taken, were at last at an end and the Union sure to be saved.
"There's certainly something about that man I don't like." "It don't never pay to knock a stand-by," opined the head barber, banteringly. As though seeking sympathy from these gibes, the young lady denominated as Sadie turned toward the well-dressed, alert-looking young man who had just come in. Apparently he impressed her as a person in whom she might confide.
The other women are rather down on Mrs. Patrick about it; indeed, Mrs. Gleeson told her one day that the creature was worth his keep if it was only for his handiness about the house. Patrick has grown used to his wife's gibes and flings, which at first used to make him red and uncomfortable. He has half come to believe in the secret hoard his wife says old Jim is accumulating.
Knowing that my wife and daughter are on his side, he takes up the line of meeting my gibes with condescending silence, as though to say: "The old chap is in his dotage; what's the use of talking to him?" Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful how petty a man may become!
The entanglement of Titus with the Jewish princess Berenice was the final outrage. The satiric poets Martial and Juvenal inserted frequent ribald references to Jewish customs; but the nature of their works precluded a serious criticism. Martial was a master of flouts, jeers, and gibes, and Juvenal was a soured and disappointed provincial, who delighted to hurl wild reproaches.
To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in Paris or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scorn on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol, which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with the researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the Rector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes at Christ Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful Church party of the University was to watch the doors of new worlds gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence.
School discipline, of course, had, for the time, restrained the gibes and sneers, the open laugh, which would have greeted Jim's announcement of his adopted name or names; but the time was only deferred.
For no freak of fancy, still less for the gibes and jests of others, should so important a connection be frustrated. The cause should be one that sober judgment will approve, to your latest day. A most trying lot is hers, who is deserted by one, who had given a solemn pledge to be hers through life. It is no credit to steel one's self against the sorrows of such a lot.
Of course my gibes at Jack were all purely foolish and jealous, and, moreover, I could now afford to be truthful; so I said, "If Jack doesn't do better, as well as look better, than my Lord Brocton, I'll thrash him soundly when he gets back. But he will. He's a rare one is Master Jack, and by a long chalk the pluckiest soul, boy or man, I've ever come across.
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