“I was just going to say, when I was interrupted …” – the first phrase in the first installment of the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, launching Holmes' series of table-talk works in the Atlantic – focuses our attention on the talk element perhaps most fundamental to his vision of conversational form: the dynamic moment of “interruption” that allows one speaker to take the floor from another and so makes possible the changes of voice, of tone, and of topic that define the most basic difference between dialogue and monologue. Traditionally, the arbiters of “polite speech” have sought to smooth over and control the potential unpleasantness of these necessary moments of alternation between voices through carefully defined rules for proper turn-taking in talk. But in mid-nineteenth-century America the issue of interruption asserted itself with a special force.