inauspicious, artful, sly, or secretly malicious, that it is "sinister"-that is, left handed.

To shake hands without removing the glove is an act of discourtesy, which, if unintentional and thoughtless, requires an apology for the hurry or inadvertence which led to it. This idea would also seem to be an occult remnant of the old notion that the glove might conceal a weapon. Hence true courtesy and friendship required that the hand should be naked as a proof of good faith.

To be "hand and glove" with any one is a proverbial expression, of which the meaning is not obvious, though possibly it may signify such a degree of confidence, intimacy, and familiarity between the parties as to make it certain that the gloved hand is as free from an offensive weapon as the ungloved.

To refuse pointedly to shake hands with one who offers you the opportunity in a friendly manner amounts to a declaration of hostility. And after a quarrel or act of open hostility-the acceptance of the hand offered is alike the sign and the ratification of peace.

The nations of continental Europe are scarcely so much addicted to hand-shaking as the English, while the English in this respect are far less demonstrative and apparently cordial than the Americans, who shake hands with one another from

All

morning to night, if even the slightest excuse or opportunity arises. "Since my arrival in the United States," wrote the late Mr. Smith O'Brien, "I have been surrounded by crowds of well-wishers, whose greatest desire seemed to be to shake hands with me. In Ireland this practice does not prevail, but here it seems to be a universal custom." travellers are equally struck with the undue prevalence of this custom, as they cannot fail to be after they have been a few days in the country. The stranger, if a man of any eminence or renown, is often introduced to forty or fifty people at a time, and to omit to shake hands with any one of them would be an act of disrespect. And even the Irish and German waiters at the great hotels expect you to shake hands with them, on your second arrival, if they happen to remember your face or name, or have received a gratuity at your hands for their previous services or attentions. And you must shake hands with the dirty as well as with the clean, and with your tailor or shoemaker, equally as with the man who invites you to dinner.

One of the greatest penalties attached to the by no means enviable office of president, is the stupendous amount of hand-shaking which that functionary has to undergo. The late good-natured President Lincoln was a serious sufferer, though it must be confessed that he often gave some too im

portunate hand-shaker such a squeeze of his powerful grasp as made him wince, and remember him with pain for a few hours after the infliction of his cordiality. Both he and other occupants of his uneasy and thankless office have, on New Year's Day, especially, and on many other occasions, to undergo an amount of hand-shaking, sufficient almost to wrench the arm off, or at least to make it ache for a fortnight afterwards. Five or six thousand people of all ranks and classes of men-from the polite European ambassadors and diplomatic agents at Washington—and the legislators, bankers, merchants, lawyers, newspaper editors and reporters, the military and naval officers, down to the common soldiers and sailors, and, lower still, down to the very rowdies and roughs of the street, are all admitted without the intervention of a gold stick or any other kind of stick, or a black or a white rod, or any kind of usher or introduction, and in any costume they please, even in that of the navvy with his heavy boots and his working jacket, or the sweep with the soot still on his face;-though it must be admitted as a rule that the rowdies, the sweeps, and the navvies, put on their best clothes on such great occasions. All of them pass through the reception hall, and each expects to shake hands with the chief magistrate.

To shake five thousand hands in succession, and

228 PHYSIOLOGY OF HAND-SHAKING.

to betray no indifference or want of cordiality in the mode of doing it—to even the humblest of the owners of the hands-is no easy task, either physically or mentally. Were not ambition more powerful to impel a man to seek high station than love of formal ease, to keep him comfortable in a lower walk of life, it is possible that many an aspiring politician, after he has become president, would gladly resign the office, to escape the hardships and inflictions—the hand-shaking not the least of them -that must be accepted along with it, like the thorns with the roses.

I have nothing to say against hand-shaking. It is pleasant to touch the hand of an honest man or woman, and to be on such terms of acquaintanceship with either of these masterpieces of creation, as to justify you in the thought that you are their equal; and that a moral sympathy may flow from you to them, or from them to you. Even to grasp the paw of an honest and intelligent dog, who holds it up for you to shake, on being asked to do so, is something. For the dog, unlike some men, would scorn to give his paw to one, in whose eye, and in whose face, he, by his fine instinct, in some respects the equal, if not the superior, of reason, discovered treachery or evil.

THE LEFT HAND: A PLEA FOR THE

NEGLECTED.

T may be Quixotic; but I must do battle in behalf of my Dulcinea. In this age, it is said that there is no wrong without a remedy. This I deny. I am positive, however, that there is no wrong, great or small, which, when pointed out, will not elicit a groan from somebody-or impel some philanthropist or it may be, some mere grumbler, to wag his tongue or dip his pen in ink, to set forth their grievances. It is not only the wronged but the neglected that find friends in our days. We redress, or strive to redress, the wrongs of history. Has not Richard the Third had his defenders and advocates? Has not Jack Cade been proved to be a gentleman? Has not Macbeth been whitewashed of the crime of murder? and have not even those despised little creatures the toads, been taken