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 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 i