Wood County Reporter

The Man Who "Sits Awhile."

Some nuisances are not indictable—more's the pity. You can arrest a man for libel, and pay costs too if you choose, but you cannot imprison him for boring you. It is a crime for a man to steal your pocket-book even if it is trash; but he may steal out of your working day three or four hours, worth perhaps ten dollars in money and double that in discipline, with perfect impunity. It is called murder for one man to destroy another's life, but when Mr. S. drops in and kills the choicest hours of your day, throttles your best ideas, and throws your whole train of thought off the track, there is nothing to be said, save that he "just thought he'd run in for a moment and sit awhile and have a friendly chat." No penalty in law, no fine, no imprisonment, no gallows. Such laws, or rather such a lack of them, reflect upon the so-called advanced civilization of century No. 19.

I have heard editors utter bitter complaints against this class of offenders. They seem to regard a man who comes in to chat with them for an hour very much as they do one who does not pay his bills. There is apparently no hope for either of them, and it is very hard for any man, and especially hard for an editor, to spend time and energy upon a hopeless case. His usual course is to send the "devil" after a man who does not pay up, and he has a sincere desire, no less real because not formulated, to pursue a similar course with a man who comes in to sit awhile. But editors are not the only victims of these vile and unmitigated interrupters of legitimate effort. They are a curse to all professional men. The man that works with his hands is usually not the master of his own time. He always has a real and admitted excuse for continuing labor. His work is seen to suffer, to be retarded by interruption. Then, too, when labor is mainly mechanical there is opportunity for brain work also, and conversation may readily accompany the manual employment. Not so with men who work with their brains. Often when apparently most idle they are putting in their biggest licks. What seems to be the mere idle watching of the curling smoke which issues from their lips is really the solving of social problems, the diagnosis of a disease, the analysis of a compound, the arrangement of a discourse. Hour after hour may pass with no visible work and no visible results, but the work is there and the result is there. Now these processes, unlike those that are merely mechanical, cannot be carried on simultaneously with others that require continued mental exertion. Some men after years of severe discipline may have acquired the faculty of thinking several things at a time, turning out their mental products by the dozen or great gross instead of singly. Napoleon could give his attention to three or four processes at once. But most men are not Napoleons, and very few are capable of thinking more than one thought at a time, and hence with the majority of us the interruption of thought is the removal of it for the time, if not its absolute destruction. It is in view of these facts that we make our outcry against men who seem to have no other business than to go round and sit upon their friends after the similitude of a peripatetic coroner's inquest; who really have no ostensible occupation but to "drop in" on busy men and "just have a chat."

It would seem, further, that some professional men can escape these inflictions of friendly burdens with greater readiness than others. Physicians are forced very often by the absolute necessities of the case to cut the inquest short. Their patients demand their presence—it may be a matter of life and death. So editors must get their copy ready for the press—they cannot be interrupted—and, as privileged characters, can hang up all sorts of ominously warning notices in their sanctums, and can give any kind of suggestive hint to their visitors; and if words fail can resort to revolvers and horse-whips to clear the boards. But the professional man who is not bound by inexorable necessity—who cannot positively say that the loss or delay of an hour will make a great deal of disturbance or an entire failure in his work, becomes the victim, pitiable and abject, of these time and thought leeches. They suppose that because a professor is much in his study, or a minister spends hour after hour among his books and papers, that he is, forsooth, legitimate prey; that his time amounts to but little, and that there is no harm in boring him for an hour or two or three.

Now, in the name of common law and decency, we protest; in the name of the scores of hours that have gone into eternity undeveloped, we protest; in the name of our thoughts lost, of our indignation excited, of our opportunities missed, we protest; and if protesting won't do any good, we propose to lock the door hereafter; that is, provided we can get our visitors on the outside.

In my opinion there ought to be an insane asylum for idlers. They are parasites, living by destroying the life of others. They cannot be persuaded of their own condition. Hints slide off them like bullets off an iron-clad or water off a duck's back; threats are considered simply as earnest remarks; nothing but the toe of your boot can convince them of the estimation in which you do hold them; and if you should undertake to kick them out they couldn't really appreciate what you mean by it. They would suppose you were only in fun. There ought to be a commission of intelligent professional men to decide upon the mental condition of bores, and to estimate the exact amount of trouble they would give to the world, and then they should be punished accordingly.

I know one man who ought to be imprisoned at hard labor until the end of his natural life, and then he ought to be hanged. He injures me about twenty dollars a week. He is terribly good natured; hopes I am not busy; says I look just as though I wanted some one to talk with; has just dropped in for a few minutes; was just waiting to see some men, and thought he might as well step in and see me, and so on, ad nauseam. He stays ad infinitum. There is no end to him. I wish there had been no beginning too. He is a longer bore than the Hoosac Tunnel. When he knows I am very busy, and when I take especial pains to allude to this article that I am finishing and that subject I am working up, he takes especial pains not to hurry away. And he never says anything although he is always talking. When he has gone, I feel just as I suppose a hen does that has been persistently picking at a heap of meal only to find her crop filled with sawdust. He is the terror of my life; for I can't keep him out of my study, and can't do anything while he is in. Will not somebody tell a poor imposed-upon fellow what to do? Quick! for here he comes now, I know his step—his hand is on the latch. There! I am in for three hours more of inanity. I ought to be canonized after my decease for being forced to submit to such an eternal bore.

"K. N. H." in Hearth and Home.