ful
as a young baby, in the old burying-ground! I've stood on the slab
many a time. Meant well,--meant well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put
a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first
thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down. T'
other fellow's at work now, but he makes more noise about it. When the
linchpin comes out on his side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some
think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are
valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this
is the great Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.

Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.

The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk
used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went
by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and foreign
vermin included,--said the little man.

This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with the
distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to exclaim,
E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed to be
interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-bladeful
of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt, interfered with
the reply he would have made.

--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think our
small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I undertake
to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too magisterially.
I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when I have been in
company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of
the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I
maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell
me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought,
I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored
brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will
begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before
he has got to th