of Knurr and Spell has no superiority to others which I have heard.
I fancy that all kinds prove equally exasperating to those who cannot join the talk, equally delightful to those who can.
But there is one kind of special conversation which, I submit, has a peculiarly atrocious flavour for the uninstructed, than which I can imagine no mere game shop that can more deplorably affect the enforced listener. For as no kind of talk is more absorbing to the majority of people than the discussion, the praise, the censure of their common acquaintances, so no kind can be more odious when the persons discussed are unknown to the victim of this shop. For to the ordinary annoyances of other people's special conversation is added the keen desire to join in, with which no other kind afflicts the listener. Nobody wants to enter a discussion of stamp collectors if he be not himself a philatelist. He is bored, and there is an end of it. But if these stamp collectors turn from their water-marks and their errors to the idiosyncrasies of some unknown James, then does the bored become the frantic, for he thinks, "Did I but know this James, with what point and venom could I criticise him! How humorously I could take him off! With what lively exaggerations could
