off from the
bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.--I
know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he
downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as
big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day. That's the way
to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.

Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin
Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a
boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if
it ought to shriek. It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of its
agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language is a
temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined. Because
time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its cornices,
shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you what comes of
meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A friend of mine
had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose
silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from its contents; you
know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb, while the core, or the
real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a peeled apple. Well, he began
with taking off the case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he
got it fairly open, and there were the works, as good as if they were
alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest. All right except
one thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and caught
hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without touching
any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and the watch had done up
twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English
language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-spring,
and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many
other dialects have done before it. I can't st