omacy you are impertinent and
quite beside yourself. You better be off from here, inasmuch as I am
the biggest toad in this puddle, and mean to remain so. We are not
inclined to know anything about Mr. Smooth; so the quicker he packs
himself and his baggage up and is off from this, the better.' The
earnestness with which he said this left me no reason to doubt his
intention to remain the biggest toad of the pool.

"'Mr. Smooth, something of a man in Washington, holds a contrary
opinion, and claims a right to know the ins and outs of what is going
on outside of your dominions, as well as inside his own, and to
insinuate himself into just what it may please him,' I replied in the
measured manner of an experienced diplomatist.

"'Perhaps you have,' he interrupted, 'but if you were possessed of
ordinary modesty, you would refrain from intermeddling when you saw
what a blasted time I had to keep that great Bear, across there, from
breaking his chain and devouring everything on this side.'

"'Feeling a fellow sympathy, I thought perhaps I might lend you a hand
to do some of the whipping,--knowing how the brute professes to be a
christian of the latest pattern.' Nicholas had a strong appetite for
the Turkey, which, though sick, he would have no objection to
breakfast upon, as I have before stated; and, that his christian cubs
might share the feast, he had begun to teach them the straightforward
principles of holy orthodoxy; which said holy orthodoxy incited a
craving for blood we have not yet learned to appreciate.

"The said sick Turkey had not given the best satisfaction to the world
in his mode of reducing to poverty his flock; and, too, he was always
ready to bandy words and ostentation,--having a large supply of the
latter always on hand. He had, moreover, evinced a certain degree of
heroism; nor was he ever backward in professing his readiness to fight
somebody--if it were the unruly Bear, so much the better. The heroism
thus manifested on the part of the decaying Turk would have deserved
more praise had it not had its origin in the assurance that Uncle John
would lend a hand to do the fighting. Mark ye! John had copiously
poured forth his treasure and blood in order that this vagabond Turkey
might still live, and be saved from the Bear's all-digesting stomach,
and for which he would deny John the freedom of his city; he would
condescend only to honor him with the title of dog.

"In one sense a more generous fellow