among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its contents, but by its address. my name (for the purposes of this article) is thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as thompson. now i confess i am a little sensitive about that "p." when i see it wedged in the middle of my name i am conscious of an annoyance altogether disproportioned to the fact. i know that taken in the lump the thompsons are as good as the thomsons. there is not a pin to choose between us. in the beginning we were all sons of some thomas or other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself thomson and that man called himself thompson. why he should have spatchcocked a "p" into his name i don't know. i daresay it was pride on his part, just as it is my pride not to have a "p."

or perhaps the explanation is that offered by fielding, the novelist. he belonged to a branch of the earl of denbigh's family, but the denbighs spelt their family name feilding. when the novelist was asked to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs, he replied: "i suppose they don't know how to spell." that is probably the case of the thompsons. they don't know how to spell.

but whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own forms with obstinate pride. we feel an outrage on our names as if it were an outrage on our persons. it was such an outrage that led to one of stevenson's most angry outbursts. some american publisher had pirated one of his books. but it was not the theft that angered him so much as the misspelling of his name. "i saw my book advertised as the work of r. l. stephenson," he says, "and i own i boiled. it is so easy to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is full length on the title-page of your booty. but no, damn him, not he! he calls me stephenson." i am grateful to stevenson for that word. it expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me thompson. thompson, indeed!

i felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, sir frederic thesiger, the uncle of the first lord chelmsford. he was addressed one day as "mr. smith," and the blood of all the thesigers (whoever they may have been) boiled within him. "do i look like a person of the name of smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on. and as the blood of all the thomsons boils within me i ask, "do i look like a person of the name of thompson? now do i?" and yet i suppose one may fall as much in love with the name of smith as with the name of thesiger, if it happens to be one's own. i should like to try the experiment on sir f. e. smith. i should like to address him as sir frederic thesiger and see how the blood of all the smiths would take it.

it is, i suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys us when people play tricks with our names. we want to be ourselves and not somebody else. we don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and the fathers that begat us. we may not know much about our ancestors, and may not care much about them. most of us, i suppose, are in the position of sydney smith. "i found my neighbours," he said, "were looking up their family tree, and i thought i would do the same, but i only got as far back as my great-grandfather, who disappeared somewhere about the time of the assizes." if we go far enough back we shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the assizes, or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't. but, such as they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those fellows, the thompsons.

and there is another reason for the annoyance. to misspell a man's name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that you need not trouble to find out. it is to offer him the subtlest of all insults—especially if he is a scotsman. the old prides and hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the scotch names, and i believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, mr. macdonald by calling him mr. m'donald or vice versa. indeed, i recall the case of a malignant scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a political opponent's name m'intosh instead of mackintosh because he knew it made him "boil," as stephenson made r. l. s. boil or as thompson makes me boil.

nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity. i like a man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or steals another. i have never thought so well of bishop percy, the author of "percy's reliques," since i discovered that his real name was piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and went into the church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house of the duke of northumberland. he even put the percy arms on his monument in dromore cathedral, and, not content with changing his own name, altered the maiden name of his wife from gutteridge to godriche. i am afraid bishop percy was a snob.

there are, of course, cases in which men change their names for reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually "something rotten about him," as johnson would say. he stamps himself as a counterfeit coin, like m. fellaire in anatole france's "jocaste." when he first started business his brass plate ran "fellaire (de sisac)." on removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and put up a plate with "fellaire, de sisac." changing residence again, he dropped the comma and became "fellaire de sisac."

it is possible of course to go to the other extreme—to err, as it were, on the side of honesty. i know a lady who began life with the maiden name of bloomer. she married a mr. watlington and became mrs. bloomer-watlington. her husband died and she married a mr. dodd, whereupon she styled herself mrs. bloomer-watlington-dodd. she is still fairly young and mr. dodd, i regret to say, is in failing health. already i have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into a single line on the envelope. i see the time approaching when i shall have to turn over and write, let us say,

there is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all this. it is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others. after all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it is the better.

but the spirit of the thing is right. let us avoid disguises. let us stick to our names, be they ever so humble. let us follow the great example of cicero. his name originated with an ancestor who had a nick or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a vetch—cicer. when he was standing for public office some anxious friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but he declined, saying that he would make the name of cicero more glorious than the scauri or catuli. and grandly did he redeem the promise. the scauri and the catuli live to-day only by the fact that cicero once mentioned them, while we know cicero far better than we know our next door neighbour. it is a good precedent for thomson. i have a mind to make that name outlast the cecils and marlboroughs, if not the pyramids. and cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."