Mrs. Crowfield. "All the troubles of the world
are laid at their door."

"Well," said Jenny, "they did burn the city of Portland, it appears.
The fire arose from firecrackers, thrown by boys among the shavings of
a carpenter's shop,--so says the paper."

"And," said Rudolph, "we surgeons expect a harvest of business from
the Fourth, as surely as from a battle. Certain to be woundings,
fractures, possibly amputations, following the proceedings of our
glorious festival."

"Why cannot we Americans learn to amuse ourselves peaceably like other
nations?" said Bob Stephens. "In France and Italy, the greatest
national festivals pass off without fatal accident, or danger to any
one. The fact is, in our country we have not learned _how to be
amused_. Amusement has been made of so small account in our philosophy
of life, that we are raw and unpracticed in being amused. Our
diversions, compared with those of the politer nations of Europe, are
coarse and savage,--and consist mainly in making disagreeable noises
and disturbing the peace of the community by rude uproar. The only
idea an American boy associates with the Fourth of July is that of
gunpowder in some form, and a wild liberty to fire off pistols in all
miscellaneous directions, and to throw firecrackers under the heels of
horses, and into crowds of women and children, for the fun of seeing
the stir and commotion thus produced. Now take a young Parisian boy
and give him a fete, and he conducts himself with greater gentleness
and good breeding, because he is part of a community in which the art
of amusement has been refined and perfected, so that he has a thousand
resources beyond the very obvious one of making a great banging and
disturbance.

"Yes," continued Bob Stephens, "the fact is, that our grim old Puritan
fathers set their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they
would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the
birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in
consequence of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New
England existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid
grind.' 'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the
German emigrants,--and they were about right. A French traveler, in
the year 1837, says that attending the Thursday-evening lectures and
church prayer-meetings was the only recreation of the young people of
Boston; and we can remember the time when this really was no