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 to my dinner like a philosopher.  Do you not remember that I was particularly brilliant upon that occasion, and that I told my best story only three times in the course of the evening?  I flatter myself that I know how to conceal my feelings,—­although I punished your claret cruelly, and was sick after it.