; and
poor thin cold stuff it is too, is claret. A man _may_ get drowned in
it, but how the plague he can get drunk with it is dark to me. It's like
every thing else French, it has no substance in it; it's nothin' but red
ink, that's a fact. Well, how it was I don't know, but so it eventuated,
that about daylight he was mops and brooms, and began to talk somethin'
or another he hadn't ought to; somethin' he didn't know himself, and
somethin' he didn't mean, and didn't remember.

"Faith, next mornin' he was booked; and the first thing he see'd when he
waked was another man a tryin' on of his shoes, to see how they'd fit to
march to the head of his regiment with. Fact, I assure you, and a fact
too that shows what Englishmen has come to; I despise 'em, I hate 'em, I
scorn such critters as I do oncarcumcised niggers."

"What a strange perversion of facts," I replied.

But he would admit of no explanation. "Oh yes, quite parvarted; not a
word of truth in it; there never is when England is consarned. There is
no beam in an Englishman's eye; no not a smell of one; he has pulled it
out long ago; that's the reason he can see the mote in other folks's
so plain. Oh, of course it ain't true; it's a Yankee invention; it's a
hickory ham and a wooden nutmeg.

"Well, then, there was another feller got bagged t'other day, as
innocent as could be, for givin' his opinion when folks was a talkin'
about matters and things in gineral, and this here one in partikilar. I
can't tell the words, for I don't know 'em, nor care about 'em; and if I
did, I couldn't carry 'em about so long; but it was for sayin' it
hadn't ought to have been taken notice of, considerin' it jist popt out
permiscuous like with the bottle-cork. If he hadn't a had the clear
grit in him, and showed teeth and claws, they'd a nullified him so, you
wouldn't have see'd a grease spot of him no more. What do you call that,
now? Do you call that liberty? Do you call that old English? Do you call
it pretty, say now? Thank God, it tante Yankee."

"I see you have no prejudice, Mr. Slick," I replied.

"Not one mite or morsel," he replied. "Tho' I was born in Connecticut, I
have travelled all over the thirteen united univarsal worlds of ourn and
am a citizen at large. No, I have no prejudice. You say I am mistaken;
p'raps I am, I hope I be, and a stranger may get hold of the wrong eend
of a thing sometimes, that's a fact. But I don't think I be wrong, or
else the papers don't tel