, in the papers; hence, it requires but a slight extension of
the imagination to apprise you, "dear reader," that our friend Phipps
was but meagerly "posted up" in what was going on in this great country,
half of his time. I must do friend Phipps the favor to say, that he was
not ignorant of the fact that "Old Hickory" fout well down to New
Orleans, and that "Old Zack" flaxed the Mexicans clean out of their
boots in Mexico; likewise that Millerism was a humbug, and money was
pretty generally considered a cash article all over the universal world.

But what did Phipps know or care about the Fugitive Slave bill? Not a
red cent's worth, no more than he did of the equitation of the earth,
the Wilmot proviso, or Barnum's woolly horse--not a _red_. He came to
Boston annually to see how things were a workin'; pleasure, not
business. The very first morning of his arrival in town, the hue and cry
of "slave hunters," was raised--Shadrack, the fugitive, was arrested at
his vocation--table servant at Taft's eating establishment, Corn Hill,
where Abner Phipps accidentally had stuck his boots under the
mahogany, for the purpose of recuperating his somewhat exhausted
inner-man. Abner saw the arrest, he was quietly discussing his
_tapioca_, and if thinking at all, was merely calculating what the
profits were, upon a two-and-sixpence dinner, at a Boston
_restaurateur_. He saw there was a muss between the black waiter and two
red-nosed white men, but as he did not know what it was all about, he
didn't care; it was none of his business; and being a part of his
religion, not to meddle with that that did not concern him, he continued
his _tapioca_ to the bottom of his plate, then forked over the
equivalent and stepped out.

As Phipps turned into Court square, it occurred, slightly, that the
niggers had got to be rather thick in Boston, to what they used to be;
and bending his footsteps down Brattle street, once or twice it occurred
to him that the niggers _had_ got to be thick--darn'd thick, for they
passed and repassed him--walked before him and behind him, and in fact
all around him.

"Yes," says Phipps, "the niggers are thick, thundering thick--never saw
'em so thick in my life. _Ain't they thick?_" he soliloquized, and as he
continued his stroll in the purlieus of "slightly soiled" garments,
vulgarly known as second-hand shops, mostly proprietorized by very
dignified and respectable _col'ud pussons_, it again struck Phipps quite
forc