You can’t keep gas in a bladder, and you can’t keep knowledge tight in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.  By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people, Sir, some of us with nutcrackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them like Aaron’s calf!

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and keep all the soul’s windows down,—­to shut out the sun from the east and the wind from the west,—­to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,—­I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red-cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.

——­Were you born in Boston, Sir?—­said the little man,—­looking eager and excited.

I was not,—­I replied.

It’s a pity,—­it’s a pity,—­said the little man;—­it’s the place to be born in.  But if you can’t fix it so as to be born here, you can come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science and the American Union, wasn’t ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis, the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.  Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffled-shirt of the Revolution, was as good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from Newport, and staid here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn’t come, too;—­we’d have made a man of him.—­poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!  There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-ground!  I’ve stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,—­meant well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down.  T’other fellow’s at work now; but he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his side, there’ll be a jerk, I tell you!  Some think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which may get hurt.  Hope not,—­hope not.  But this is the great Macadamizing place,—­always cracking up something.

Cracking up Boston folks,—­said the gentleman with the diamond-pin, whom, for convenience’ sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.

The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel’s Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went by cogwheels.—­Cracking up all sorts of things,—­native and foreign vermin included,—­said the little man.