rm season comes on, every year. They close their
front window blinds, and steal into and out of their houses like thieves,
or dogs that have just had a flogging, so that their neighbors will think
they have gone to Saratoga, or Rockaway, or some other fashionable summer
retreat. They take a good deal of pains to pass for so much more than they
are worth--do they not, little friend? They only go for pistareens, though,
where they are known.

One sometimes comes across a public speaker--a lawyer--possibly a
preacher--who displays his eloquence by using all sorts of long and
out-of-the-way words. A man may be listening ever so quietly and
innocently, and the first thing he knows, down comes a word about his ears
half as long as his arm almost, and half as heavy as a mallet. That is what
the orator calls a _knock-down_ argument; and when he wishes to be
particularly convincing and eloquent, he throws at you such brick-bats and
bars of iron as incomprehensibility--epexegetically--anthropopathically--so
fast that you have scarcely a chance to dodge one before another comes
whizzing along. Of course, you are confounded with the man's assault and
battery, and if you are a thinking person, perhaps fall to musing how such
monstrous words can come out of a man's throat whole, without choking him,
or themselves splitting to pieces. When I hear a public speaker going on in
that way, I generally think that the poor fellow is making up in big words
what he lacks in brains, and if I could whisper a small word or two in his
ear, I should be apt to say, "That will never do, sir. You can't pass
yourself off for a great scholar with this clap-trap. You are nothing but a
pistareen, and rather smooth at that. You are, indeed. Those big words that
we have to bend up and twist around to get into our coat-pockets, will not
go for sense. So pray be quiet, and not attempt to pass for any more than
you are honestly worth, which is little enough, to be sure."

I have known boys and girls at school attempt to pass for more than their
real value. Whenever I hear a boy asking somebody to write a composition
for him, or to help him write one, which he intends to palm off as his own,
or see him jog the boy that sits next him in the school-room, to get some
help in reciting a bad lesson, I think of the pistareen, and want very much
to caution the little fellow not to pass for more than he is worth. And it
makes very little difference that I know of, wheth