She, Laura, was stitching on some shirts for “him.”  They were intended as a wedding-gift from herself, and were beautifully made.  Laura despised a Wheeler-and-Wilson, and all its kindred,—­and the shirts looked like shirts, consequently.

I linger a little, shivering on the brink.  Somehow I always say “him,”—­nowadays, of course, Mr. Sampson,—­but then I always said “he” and “him.”  I know why country-folk say so, now.  Though sentimentalists say, it is because there is only one “he” for “her,” I don’t believe it.  It is because their names are Jotham, or Adoniram, or Jehiel, or Asher, or some of those names, and so they say “he,” for short.  But there was no short for me.  So I may as well come to it.  “His” name was America,—­America Sampson.  It is four years and a half since I knew this for a fact, yet my surprise is not lessened.  Epithets are weak trash for such an occasion, or I should vituperate even now the odious practice of saddling children with one’s own folly or prejudice in the shape of names.

There was no help for it.  There was no hope.  My lover had not received his name from any rich uncle, with the condition of a handsome fortune; so he had no chance of indignantly asserting his choice to be Herbert barefoot rather than Hog’s-flesh with gold shoes.  His father and mother had given his name,—­not at the baptismal font, for they were Baptists, and didn’t baptize so,—­but they had given it to him.  They were both alive and well, and so were seventeen uncles and aunts who would all know,—­in good health, and bad taste, all of them.

“He” had four brothers to keep him in countenance, all with worse names than his:  Washington, Philip Massasoit, Scipio, and Hiram Yaw Byron!  There was the excuse, in this last name, of its being a family one, as far as Yaw went; but——­However, as I said, language is wholly inadequate and weak for some purposes.  There was a lower deep than America,—­that was some comfort.

Hiram Yaw wasn’t sent to college, but to Ashtabula, wherever that is, and I never wish to see him.  But to college was America sent,—­to be “hazed,” and taunted, and called “E Plury,” and his beak and claws inquired after, through the freshman year.  I never knew how he went through,—­I mean, with what feelings.  Of course, he was the first scholar.  But that, even, must have been but a small consolation.

The worst of all was, he was sensitive about his name,—­whether because it had been used to torment him, and so, like poor worn-out Nessus, he wrapped more closely his poisoned scarf, (I like scarf better than shirt,)—­or whether he had, in the course of his law-studies and men-studies, come to think it really mattered very little what a man’s name was in the beginning; at all events, he had no notion of dismissing his own.

My own secret hope had been, that, by an Act of the Legislature, which that very season had changed Pontifex Parker to Charles Alfred Parker, Mr. Sampson might be accommodated with a name less unspeakably national.  Dear me!  Alfred, Arthur, Albert,—­if he must begin with A.