hold, but the animosity of the entire neighborhood.
If Polly during her outburst of temper against us could have realized that all her confidences to passers-by regarding her passion for crackers or her desire to have her head scratched, were couched in the very accents of her flouted family, she might have suffered a blighting mortification. The springs of our eloquence, as George Eliot has pointed out, would be instantly dried up, did we but know that our audience was more concerned with the eccentricities of our delivery than with the weight of our argument.
But Poll was not an artist. Her preference for strangers was over done, and consequently unconvincing. It was a mean, round-about way of getting back at us. Moreover, it led to a very unpleasant episode, one which in its turn gave place to a most unhappy end, namely, the curtailment of certain cherished privileges, though, I have no doubt, she ascribed this result solely to our own baseness of disposition. It takes breadth of vision to perceive in ourselves the obscure causes of those actions which displease us in others.
