rate, he
did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some
copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited
from our English fathers. Language!--the blood of the soul, Sir! into
which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word
is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at
Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and
Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second,
and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to
spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries! R-e, re, s-i-s,
sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and it was a good
many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their
muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old
bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes,
yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Independence
and Union! I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye,
sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is worth
speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to play
tricks with it. We never make a new word til we have made a new thing or
a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this continent, we
had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal
curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this
great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this thirty-wasted
wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray over the human
vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his
high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders call
John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him
take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting
on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a
glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.
Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch