autumn or winter illustration, for that might have subjected him to
condign punishment for its unseasonableness. As it was, the defence set
up was to the full as unlucky as any other might have been.

"I'll tell you what, Master Bunce, it won't do to take natur in vain. If
you can show me a better painter than natur, from your pairts, I give
up; but until that time, I say that any man who thinks to give the woods
a different sort of face from what God give 'em, ought to be licked for
his impudence if nothing else."

The pedler ventured again to expostulate; but the argument having been
considered conclusive against him, he was made to hold his peace, while
the prosecutor proceeded.

"Now then, Mr. Chairman, as I was saying--here is a sample of the kind
of stuff he thinks to impose upon us. Look now at this here article, and
I reckon it's jist as good as any of the rest, and say whether a little
touch of Lynch's law, an't the very thing for the Yankee!"

Holding up the devoted calico to the gaze of the assembly, with a single
effort of his strong and widely-distended arms, he rent it asunder with
little difficulty, the sweep not terminating, until the stuff, which,
by-the-way, resigned itself without struggle or resistance to its fate,
had been most completely and evenly divided. The poor pedler in vain
endeavored to stay a ravage that, once begun, became epidemical. He
struggled and strove with tenacious hand, holding on to sundry of his
choicest bales, and claiming protection from the chair, until warned of
his imprudent zeal in behalf of goods so little deserving of the risk,
by the sharp and sudden application of an unknown hand to his ears which
sent him reeling against the table, and persuaded him into as great a
degree of patience, as, under existing circumstances, he could be well
expected to exhibit. Article after article underwent a like analysis of
its strength and texture, and a warm emulation took place among the
rioters, as to their several capacities in the work of destruction. The
shining bottoms were torn from the tin-wares in order to prove that such
a separation was possible, and it is doing but brief justice to the
pedler to say, that, whatever, in fact, might have been the true
character of his commodities, the very choicest of human fabrics could
never have resisted the various tests of bone and sinew, tooth and nail,
to which they were indiscriminately subjected. Immeasurable was the
confusion t