oner, parliamenterer or sodger officer, that dare to
report me, I guess he'd wish he'd been born a week later, that's all.
I'd make a caution of him, _I_ know. I'd polish his dial-plate fust, and
then I'd feel his short ribs, so as to make him larf, a leetle jist a
leetle the loudest he ever heerd. Lord, he'd think thunder and lightnin'
a mint julip to it. I'd ring him in the nose as they do pigs in my
country, to prevent them rootin' up what they hadn't ought."

Having excited himself by his own story, he first imagined a case and
then resented it, as if it had occurred. I expressed to him my great
regret that he should visit England with these feelings and prejudices,
as I had hoped his conversation would have been as rational and as
amusing as it was in Nova Scotia, and concluded by saying that I felt
assured he would find that no such prejudice existed here against his
countrymen, as he entertained towards the English.

"Lord love you!" said he, "I have no prejudice. I am the most candid man
you ever see. I have got some grit, but I ain't ugly, I ain't indeed."

"But you are wrong about the English; and I'll prove it to you. Do you
see that turkey there?" said he.

"Where?" I asked. "I see no turkey; indeed, I have seen none on board.
What do you mean?"

"Why that slight, pale-faced, student-like Britisher; he is a turkey,
that feller. He has been all over the Union, and he is a goin' to write
a book. He was at New York when we left, and was introduced to me in the
street. To make it liquorish, he has got all the advertisements about
runaway slaves, sales of niggers, cruel mistresses and licentious
masters, that he could pick up. He is a caterer and panderer to English
hypocrisy. There is nothin' too gross for him to swaller. We call them
turkeys; first because they travel so fast--for no bird travels hot foot
that way, except it be an ostrich--and second, because they gobble
up every thing that comes in their way. Them fellers will swaller a
falsehood as fast as a turkey does a grasshopper; take it right down
whole, without winkin'.

"Now, as we have nothin' above particular to do, 'I'll cram him' for
you; I will show you how hungry he'll bite at a tale of horror, let it
be never so onlikely; how readily he will believe it, because it is agin
us; and then, when his book comes out, you shall see that all England
will credit it, though I swear I invented it as a cram, and you swear
you heard it told as a joke.