prayers, when he
and all on shipboard with him were starving, a dolphin was sent daily,
'which was enough to serve 'em; only on _Saturdays_ they still catched a
couple, and on the _Lord's Days_ they could catch none at all'? Haply
they might have been permitted, by way of mortification, to take some
few sculpins (those banes of the salt-water angler), which unseemly fish
would, moreover, have conveyed to them a symbolical reproof for their
breach of the day, being known in the rude dialect of our mariners as
_Cape Cod Clergymen_.

It has been a refreshment to many nice consciences to know that our
Chief Magistrate would not regard with eyes of approval the (by many
esteemed) sinful pastime of dancing, and I own myseif to be so far of
that mind, that I could not but set my face against this Mexican Polka,
though danced to the Presidential piping with a Gubernatorial second. If
ever the country should be seized with another such mania _pro
propaganda fide_, I think it would be wise to fill our bombshells with
alternate copies of the Cambridge Platform and the Thirty-nine Articles,
which would produce a mixture of the highest explosive power, and to
wrap every one of our cannon-balls in a leaf of the New Testament, the
reading of which is denied to those who sit in the darkness of Popery.
Those iron evangelists would thus be able to disseminate vital religion
and Gospel truth in quarters inaccessible to the ordinary missionary. I
have seen lads, unimpregnate with the more sublimated punctiliousness of
Walton, secure pickerel, taking their unwary _siesta_ beneath the
lily-pads too nigh the surface, with a gun and small shot. Why not,
then, since gunpowder was unknown in the time of the Apostles (not to
enter here upon the question whether it were discovered before that
period by the Chinese), suit our metaphor to the age in which we live,
and say _shooters_ as well as _fishers_ of men?

I do much fear that we shall be seized now and then with a Protestant
fervor, as long as we have neighbor Naboths whose wallowings in
Papistical mire excite our horror in exact proportion to the size and
desirableness of their vineyards. Yet I rejoice that some earnest
Protestants have been made by this war,--I mean those who protested
against it. Fewer they were than I could wish, for one might imagine
America to have been colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African
animals the Aye-Ayes, so difficult a word is _No_ to us all. There i