If you _bore people_ you can't be loved. _Don't you want to be loved?_ Don't YOU?
Then sign and mail this coupon _at once_. Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his famous mail course, _How not to be a Bore_.
The explanation, I fancy, must be that people who sign and mail coupons _at once_ do not know when they are bored; that the word 'boredom,' so hopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is nevertheless but caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprising correspondence school.
A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields some striking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to have regarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's _Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothing about boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently never been studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and Bores Negative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself.
The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. Unlike Carlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, and so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sits tight and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Man kept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. Charlie Wax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always so well-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone with him under compulsion to keep up a conversation.
Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of the printing-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and kept mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with the mind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if the reader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_ accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulate thinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before his progeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and even then they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice.