ing you a reformed inebriate or a Martha Washington!

Between Drunken Barnaby and Neal Dow there is, I trust, a position
which a gentleman may occupy. Because I have a touch of Charles
Surface in my constitution, I need not make a Toodles of myself. So
bring out the smallest canakin and let it clink softly,--for I have
news to tell you.

I remember, Bob, my boy, once upon a certain Fourth of July,--I
leave the particular Fourth as indefinite as Mr. Webster's "_some_
Fourth" upon which we were to go to war with England,--while there was
a tintinnabulation of the bells, and an ear-splitting tantivy of brass
bands, and an explosion of squibs, which, properly engineered, would
have prostrated the great Chinese Wall, or the Porcelain Tower itself,
--in short, a noise loud enough to make a Revolutionary patriot turn
with joy in his coffin,--that I left my Pottery, after dutifully
listening to Mrs. Potter's performance of twenty-eight brilliant
variations, _pour le piano_, on "Yankee Doodle," by H. Hertz,
(_Op_. 22,378,)--and sought the punches and patriotism, the
joy and the juleps of the Wagonero Cottage. I found you, Bobus,
as cool as if Fahrenheit and Reaumur were not bursting around you.
Well do I remember the patriarchal appearance which you presented,
seated in your own garden, (I think you took the prize for pompions
at the county exhibition soon after,) under your own wide-spreading
elm-tree, reading for facts in one of those confounded cigars, with
which, being proof against them yourself, you were in the habit of
poisoning your friends. Solitary and alone, you would have reminded
me of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,--three distinguished heads of families
rolled into one,--but, surrounded as you were by the fruits of a happy
union, the triple comparison was not to be resisted. Notwithstanding
your hearty welcome, I was a little dispirited,--for I had come from a
childless home. God had taken my sole little lamb,--and many miles
away, with none to care for the flowers which in the first winter of
our bereavement we had scattered upon her rounded grave, she who was
the light of our eyes was sleeping. And while we were thus stricken
and lonesome and desolate, your quiver was full and running over. I do
not mind saying now, that I envied you, as I distributed the squibs,
rockets, and other pyrotechnical fodder which I had brought in my
pocket for your flock. I gulped it all down, however, with a pretty
good grace, and went