ing,
though why we should regard it profane to make free with the devil's
name, or even his nickname, I never could see. Can you? Besides, there
was some ambiguity about Charley's use of the word under the
circumstances, and he himself couldn't tell whether his exclamation had
reference to the Author of Evils or only to the Author of Novels. The
circumstances were calculated to suggest equally thoughts of the Great
Teller of Stories and of the Great Story-teller, and I have a mind to
amuse you at this Christmas season by telling you the circumstances,
and letting you decide, if you can, which Dickens it was that Charles
Vanderhuyn intended.

Charley Vanderhuyn was one of those young men that could grow nowhere
on this continent except in New York. He had none of the severe dignity
that belongs to a young man of wealth who has passed his life in sight
of long rows of red brick houses with clean doorsteps and white wooden
shutters. Something of the venerableness of Independence Hall, the
dignity of Girard College, and the air of financial importance that
belongs to the Mint gets into the blood of a Philadelphian. Charley had
none of that. Neither did he have that air of profound thought, that
Adams-Hancock-Quincy-Webster-Emerson-Sumner look that is the inevitable
mark of Beacon Street. When you see such a young man you know that he
has grown part of Faneuil Hall, and the Common, and the Pond, and the
historic elm. He has lived where the very trees are learned and carry
their Latin names about with them. Charley had none of the "vim" and
dash that belongs to a Westerner. He was of the metropolis--metropolitan.
He had good blood in him, else he could never have founded the
Christmas Club, for you can not get more out of a man than there is in
his blood. Charley Vanderhuyn bore a good old Dutch name--I have heard
that the Van der Huyns were a famous and noble family; his Dutch blood
was mingled with other good strains, and the whole was mellowed into
generousness and geniality in generations of prosperous ancestors; for
the richest and choicest fruit (and the rankest weeds as well!) can be
produced only in the sunlight. And a very choice fruit of a very choice
stock was and is our Charley Vanderhuyn. That everybody knows who knows
him now, and that we all felt who knew him earlier in the days of the
Hasheesh Club.

You remember the Hasheesh Club, doubtless. In its day it numbered the
choicest spirits in New York, and the v