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The strangest thing in the world is the different way in which whist affects the temper. It is no test of temper, as some pretend, not at all! The best-tempered people in the world grow snappish at whist; and I have seen the most testy and peevish in the ordinary affairs of life bear their losses with the stoicism of Epictetus.
"May I tell you how you can make me absolutely contented?" "I suppose that will mean some favor from me," said Leonore. "I don't like children who want to be bribed out of their bad temper. Nice little boys are never bad-tempered." "I was only bad-tempered," whispered Peter, "because I was kept from being with you. That's cause enough to make the best-tempered man in the universe murderous."
Well, my father used to say that a farmer was not worth a farthing that was not in the field by four; and my poor dear mother, too, the best-tempered woman in the world, she always began milking exactly at five; and if a single soul was to be found in bed after four in the summer, you might have heard her from one end of the farm to the other.
I ran to open it, when I found Hector's teeth clenched in the trowsers of a little, dark, thick-set man, who said in a gruff voice, "Call off; our dog. What the devil do you keep such an infernal brute about the house for? Is it to bite people who come to see you?" Hector was the best-behaved, best-tempered animal in the world; he might have been called a gentlemanly dog.
It was thus with all the assaults ever made upon the character of Washington. They always failed to injure it in the slightest degree; and the sharpest and best-tempered shafts of malignity fell blunted and harmless from the invulnerable shield of his spotless integrity. The managers of the feast sent the following invitation to President Washington:
Bigley Uggleston, my other companion, on the contrary, was about the best-tempered fellow that ever lived. He was the son of old Jonas Uggleston, who lived at the big cottage down in the Gap, on one side of the little stream.
He has a great many amusing episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down, and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said to become when they speak of niggers, and deals out to them the terms limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so forth, with great volubility.
Meanwhile the moment they were out of sight Lionel had turned upon his sister sharply, and angrily. "Moggy, what on earth do you mean by speaking so to Mrs. Templestowe?" "Speaking how? What did I say?" retorted Imogen. "You didn't say anything out of the common, but your manner was most disagreeable. If she hadn't been the best-tempered woman in the world she would have resented it on the spot.
He had come out thinking that he would see the English working class, "the best-behaved and the best-tempered crowd in the world," enjoying the simple pleasure of the Saturday night's shopping.
To some extent he has done this consciously. "It is very conducive to successful breeding to keep only such as are quiet and tractable," says an authority on rabbits, and he enjoins the selection of the handsomest and best-tempered does to serve as breeders. To a still greater extent man has favoured tameness unconsciously and indirectly.
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