ily as American by origin,
European by emigration, and restored to its paternal soil by the
mutations and calculations of industry and trade.

The glorious family of cotemporaneous plants from which I derive my
being, grew in a lovely vale of Connecticut, and quite near to the
banks of the celebrated river of the same name. This renders us
strictly Yankee in our origin, an extraction of which I find all who
enjoy it fond of boasting. It is the only subject of self-felicitation
with which I am acquainted that men can indulge in, without awakening
the envy of their fellow-creatures; from which I infer it is at least
innocent, if not commendable.

We have traditions among us of the enjoyments of our predecessors, as
they rioted in the fertility of their cis-atlantic field; a happy
company of thriving and luxuriant plants. Still, I shall pass them
over, merely remarking that a bountiful nature has made such provision
for the happiness of all created things as enables each to rejoice in
its existence, and to praise, after its fashion and kind, the divine
Being to which it owes its creation.

{cis-atlantic = this side of the Atlantic (Latin)}

In due time, the field in which my forefathers grew was gathered, the
seed winnowed from the chaff and collected in casks, when the whole
company was shipped for Ireland. Now occurred one of those chances
which decide the fortunes of plants, as well as those of men, giving me
a claim to Norman, instead of Milesian descent. The embarkation, or
shipment of my progenitors, whichever may be the proper expression,
occurred in the height of the last general war, and, for a novelty, it
occurred in an English ship. A French privateer captured the vessel on
her passage home, the flaxseed was condemned and sold, my ancestors
being transferred in a body to the ownership of a certain agriculturist
in the neighborhood of Evreux, who dealt largely in such articles.
There have been evil disposed vegetables that have seen fit to reproach
us with this sale as a stigma on our family history, but I have ever
considered it myself as a circumstance of which one has no more reason
to be ashamed than a D'Uzes has to blush for the robberies of a baron
of the middle ages. Each is an incident in the progress of
civilization; the man and the vegetable alike taking the direction
pointed out by Providence for the fulfilment of his or its destiny.

{Milesian = slang for Irish, from Milesius, mythical Spanish co