American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1879-08-16
The Talking Man.

Don e you IKE TO meet taking man
when you travel? The man who talks
necessarily and never says any thing. /
have met him on railway trains, on al
most every road between Kansas and
Maine. have sat beside him and heard
him fill mile after weary mile with the
dreariest chatter about nothing, until l
was ready to pray for broken rail, a
burned bridge, an open switch, a wild
train, any thing in the shape of instant
death, to save me from lingering tor
ture. You may wonder that sleep never
kindly comes to the relief of the victim
of the talking man. He won't let it.
When he sees you begin to look sleepy,
he clutches your arm, he shakes you by
the shoulder, he says: "SeeP Seep" at
regular intervals, and from time to time
asks you "what do you think of thatp"
to insure your wakefulness. 1 have
often wondered why this talking ma
chine could not just as well talk to the
stove or panel in the car, because, as
no intelligence is required to conduct
his conversation, none should be neces-
sary in listening to it. Bur he won't
talk that way. He appears to find his
incentive to talk, in your suffering. His
eloquence is born of your agony. You
have heard him as have. You have
wished him dead, you have wondered
why merciful Providence ever turned
him loose on mankind. expect Provi-
dence itself sometimes wonders the
same thing, when it hears the man, when
he has a full head of steam on and some
body to talk to.
This man was on the boat when we
came here. He got on at Portland,
stopped talking long enough to eat his
supper, and then crowded man down
into one corner of the cabin and began
talking. 1 heard him at intervals-for
I will not deceive you, 1 was not exact
~ well that night-as long as he could
keep a passenger awake, and then l
heard him talking to a Waterman until
sleep ended my misery. In the morn
ing heard his voice back aft and found
him talking with two ladies. He was
telling them about a trip he once made
to Europe, and he began at the time
when he got letter from his uncle ask.
ing him to go, and he never omitted a
detail of his preparations. He told about
the letter; what he was thinking of when
he got it, how he happened to go into
the Post office, what he said to the clerk
and what the clerk said to him, who the
clerk was. and who his sister married
her husbands first name and the kind of
q hat he used to wear; the street they
lived on, the number of the house, and
the name of the man who used to
live next door, where he moved to
and why he moved, and who
lives in his old house now; the kind of
people they are and why he, the mar
rator, did not and does not like them
all this to entire strangers, who never
saw him and never heard of the charac-
ters of his narrative before, and would
never hear of them again, if, please
heaven, they ever got through with
them this time, and so on, from one flat,
tiresome, stupid passage to another,
this mans talk dribbled along all the
way from Portland to st. John, with the
embarrassing, commonplace flow of
cellar drain. You have heard him,
know. do not dislike talkative peo-
pie. Indeed, when they have any thing
to say, I rather like their chatter. But
man who talks merely for the sake of
talking, is of all bores the worst and
most trying. Conversation is pleasant
only when it is easy. When it has to
be pumped along by forcefal efforts, or
when it is conducted by man who
simply pulls plug out of himself and
lets the talk flow out of him, prefer
the comfort of silence Burdette's Let
ter to Burlington Hawkeye.