Chapter LXXVII: What to Do When You Are Angry

"'When you are angry take three breaths before you speak.'

"I couldn't do it, said Mrs. Penlimmon. Long before that time I should be as placid as an oyster. 'Three breaths!' I could double Cape Horn in that time. I'm telegraphic wire; if I had to stop to reflect, I should never be saucy. I can't hold anger any more than an April sky can retain showers; the first thing I know, the sun is shining. You may laugh, but that's better than one of your foggy dispositions, drizzling drops of discomfort a month on a stretch; no computing whether you'll have anything but gray clouds overhead the rest of your life. No; a good heavy clap of thunder for me--a lightning flash; then a bright blue sky and a clear atmosphere, and I am ready for the first flower that springs up in my path.

"'Three breaths!' how absurd! as if people, when they get excited, ever _have_ any breath, or if they have are conscious of it. I should like to see the Solomon who got off that sage maxim. I should like better still, to give him an opportunity to test his own theory! It's very refreshing to see how good people can be, when they have no temptation to sin; how they can sit down and make a code of laws for the world in general and sinners in particular.

"'Three breaths!' I wouldn't give a three-cent piece for anybody who is that long about anything. The days of stage coaches have gone by. If you ever noticed it, nobody passes muster now but comets, locomotives, and telegraph wires. Our forefathers and foremothers would have to hold the hair on their heads if they should wake up in 1855. They'd be as crazy as a cat in a shower bath, at all our whizzing and rushing. Nice old snails! it's a question with me whether I should have crept on at their pace if I had been a cotemporary. Christopher Columbus would have discovered the New World much quicker than he did had I been at his elbow."