is head. Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as
if he were accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had
been obliged to exert his authority there,--"John, go sit down, mind
your business,--we've heard you talk before,--precious little you'll
do,--your bark is worse than your bite." But, without minding, John
muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the table
which the old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and then
turned to the apples which his aged mother was paring, that she might
give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast; but she drew them away,
and sent him off.

When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills
between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace
of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the
hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely that I mistook him for a
scarecrow.

This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the
best-preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to
have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he
was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus who
listened to his story.

"Not by Haemonian hills the Thracian bard,
Nor awful Phoebus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard."

There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation,
for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when
Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day, when
the troubles between the Colonies and the mother-country first broke
out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane,
an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him,
"Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into
the ocean with a pitchfork as for the Colonies to undertake to gain
their independence." He remembered well General Washington, and how he
rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us
how he looked.

"He was a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and
resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg, as he sat on his
horse.--There, I'll tell you, this was the way with Washington." Then he
jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as
if he were waving his hat. Said he, "_That_ was Washington."

He told us many anecdotes of