rominent in his eyes--"well, now, I take it, friend, there's no love to
spare for the people you speak of down in these parts. They don't seem
to smell at all pleasant in this country."

"No, I guess not, strannger, as how should they--a mean, tricky,
catchpenny, skulking set--that makes money out of everybody, and hain't
the spirit to spend it! I do hate them, now, worse than a polecat!"

"Well, now, friend, that's strange. If you were to travel for a spell,
down about Boston or Salem in Massachusetts, or at Meriden in
Connecticut, you'd hear tell of the Yankees quite different. If you
believe what the people say thereabouts, you'd think there was no sich
people on the face of the airth."

"That's jist because they don't know anything about them; and it's not
because they can't know them neither, for a Yankee is a varmint you can
nose anywhere. It must be that none ever travels in those parts--selling
their tin-kettles, and their wooden clocks, and all their notions."

"Oh, yes, they do. They make 'em in those parts. I know it by this same
reason, that I bought a lot myself from a house in Connecticut, a town
called Meriden, where they make almost nothing else but clocks--where
they make 'em by steam, and horse-power, and machinery, and will turn
you out a hundred or two to a minute."

The pedler had somewhat "overleaped his shoulders," as they phrase it in
the West, when his companion drew himself back over the blazing embers,
with a look of ill-concealed aversion, exclaiming, as he did so--

"Why, you ain't a Yankee, air you?"

The pedler was a special pleader in one sense of the word, and knew the
value of a technical distinction as well as his friend, Lawyer Pippin.
His reply was prompt and professional:--

"Why, no, I ain't a Yankee according to your idee. It's true, I was born
among them; but that, you know, don't make a man one on them?"

"No, to be sure not. Every man that's a freeman has a right to choose
what country he shall belong to. My dad was born in Ireland, yet he
always counted himself a full-blooded American."

The old man found a parallel in his father's nativity, which satisfied
himself of the legitimacy of the ground taken by the pedler, and helped
the latter out of his difficulty.

"But here's the whiskey standing by us all the time, waiting patiently
to be drunk. Here, Nick Snell, boy, take your hands out of your
breeches-pocket, and run down with the calabash to the branch. The water