s.

There was no help for it. There was no hope. My lover had not received
his name from any rich uncle, with the condition of a handsome fortune;
so he had no chance of indignantly asserting his choice to be Herbert
barefoot rather than Hog's-flesh with gold shoes. His father and mother
had given his name,--not at the baptismal font, for they were Baptists,
and didn't baptize so,--but they had given it to him. They were both
alive and well, and so were seventeen uncles and aunts who would all
know,--in good health, and bad taste, all of them.

"He" had four brothers to keep him in countenance, all with worse names
than his: Washington, Philip Massasoit, Scipio, and Hiram Yaw Byron!
There was the excuse, in this last name, of its being a family one,
as far as Yaw went; but----However, as I said, language is wholly
inadequate and weak for some purposes. There was a lower deep than
America,--that was some comfort.

Hiram Yaw wasn't sent to college, but to Ashtabula, wherever that is,
and I never wish to see him. But to college was America sent,--to be
"hazed," and taunted, and called "E Plury," and his beak and claws
inquired after, through the freshman year. I never knew how he went
through,--I mean, with what feelings. Of course, he was the first
scholar. But that, even, must have been but a small consolation.

The worst of all was, he was sensitive about his name,--whether because
it had been used to torment him, and so, like poor worn-out Nessus,
he wrapped more closely his poisoned scarf, (I like scarf better than
shirt,)--or whether he had, in the course of his law-studies and
men-studies, come to think it really mattered very little what a man's
name was in the beginning; at all events, he had no notion of dismissing
his own.

My own secret hope had been, that, by an Act of the Legislature, which
that very season had changed Pontifex Parker to Charles Alfred Parker,
Mr. Sampson might be accommodated with a name less unspeakably national.
Dear me! Alfred, Arthur, Albert,--if he must begin with A.

"A was an Archer, and shot at a frog."

I should even prefer Archer. It needn't be Insatiate Archer. So I kept
turning over and over the painful subject, one evening,--I mean, of
course, in my mind, for I had not really broached this matter of
legislative action. Luckily, "he" had brought in the new edition of
George Herbert's Works. We were reading aloud, and "he" read the chapter
of "The Parson in Sacraments."