e or two
occurrences, and his prejudice, (which, notwithstanding his disavowal,
I knew to be so strong, as to warp all his opinions of England and the
English), immediately built up a system, which nothing I could say,
could at all shake.

I assured him the instances he had mentioned were isolated and
unauthorized acts, told in a very distorted manner but mitigated, as
they really were, when truly related, they were at the time received
with the unanimous disapprobation of every right-thinking man in the
kingdom, and that the odium which had fallen on the relators, was so
immeasurably greater than what had been bestowed on the thoughtless
principals, that there was no danger of such things again occurring in
our day. But he was immovable.

"Oh, of course, it isn't true," he said, "and every Englishman will
swear it's a falsehood. But you must not expect us to disbelieve it,
nevertheless; for your travellers who come to America, pick up here and
there, some absurd ontruth or another; or, if they are all picked up
already, invent one; and although every man, woman, and child is ready
to take their bible oaths it is a bam, yet the English believe this one
false witness in preference to the whole nation.

"You must excuse me, Squire; you have a right to your opinion, though
it seems you have no right to blart it out always; but I am a freeman,
I was raised in Slickville, Onion County, State of Connecticut, United
States of America, which _is_ a free country, and no mistake; and I have
a right to my opinion, and a right to speak it, too; and let me see the
man, airl or commoner, parliamenterer or sodger officer, that dare to
report me, I guess he'd wish he'd been born a week later, that's all.
I'd make a caution of him, _I_ know. I'd polish his dial-plate fust, and
then I'd feel his short ribs, so as to make him larf, a leetle jist a
leetle the loudest he ever heerd. Lord, he'd think thunder and lightnin'
a mint julip to it. I'd ring him in the nose as they do pigs in my
country, to prevent them rootin' up what they hadn't ought."

Having excited himself by his own story, he first imagined a case and
then resented it, as if it had occurred. I expressed to him my great
regret that he should visit England with these feelings and prejudices,
as I had hoped his conversation would have been as rational and as
amusing as it was in Nova Scotia, and concluded by saying that I felt
assured he would find that no such prejudice exi