--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to something?
--I thought it best not to hear this question.
--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere.One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy.He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the bandages.Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it.But as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have seen before.At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the streets all our lives.The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is not very hard for him to take them off.Still, a great many people like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.How they spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the first was an emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot myself.But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any.I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If Iput a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow! I don't want a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary; Sir! It takes Boston to do that thing, Sir!
--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston, --remarked the Koh-i-noor.
I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.--Mr.Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited from our English fathers.Language! --the blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word is worth here in Boston.Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't in the Colonial dictionaries ! R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance! That was in '43, and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes, yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Independence and Union! I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is worth speaking.We know what language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it.We never make a new word til we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few.When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two.The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's destiny!
He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair human proportions.His feet must have been on the upper round of his high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders call John.
The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.An old man in a brown coat.
Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.Was a boy then, and remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
--I know the trick.Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
he downs the whole of it.In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the 'lection dinner.
Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
