tricolor which floated over them seemed to shed upon their heads a mild influence of that Gallic madness that led them into absurdities we could not now believe, were they not on record.  The fashions, sartorial and social, of the French were affected; amiable Yankees called each other citizen, invented the feminine citess, and proposed changing our old calendar for the Ventose and Fructidor arrangement of the one and indivisible republic. (We wish they had adopted their admirable system of weights and measures.) Divines are said to have offered up thanks to the Supreme Being for the success of the good Sans-culottes.  At all events, their victories were celebrated by civic festivals and the discharge of cannon; the English flag was burned as a sacrifice to the Goddess of Liberty; a French frigate took a prize off the Capes of the Delaware, and sent her in to Philadelphia; thousands of the populace crowded the wharves, and, when the British colors were seen reversed, and the French flying over them, burst into exulting hurras.  When a report came that the Duke of York was a prisoner and shown in a cage in Paris, all the bells of Philadelphia rang peals of joy for the downfall of tyrants.  Here is the story of a civic fete given at Reading, in Massachusetts, which we extract from a newspaper of the time as a specimen of the Gallo-Yankee absurdities perpetrated by our grandfathers:—­

“The day was ushered in by the ringing of the bells, and a salute of fifteen discharges from a field-piece.  The American flag waved in the wind, and the flag of France over the British in inverted order.  At noon a large number of respectable citizens assembled at Citizen Raynor’s, and partook of an elegant entertainment.  After dinner, Captain Emerson’s military company in uniform assembled and escorted the citizens to the meeting-house, where an address pertinent to the occasion was delivered by the Rev. Citizen Prentiss, and united prayers and praises were offered to God, and several hymns and anthems were well sung; after which they returned in procession to Citizen Raynor’s, where three farmers, with their frocks and utensils, and with a tree on their shoulders, were escorted by the military company formed in a hollow square to the Common, where the tree was planted in form, as an emblem of freedom, and the Marseillaise Hymn was sung by a choir within a circle round the tree.  Major Boardman, by request, superintended the business of the day, and directed the manoeuvres.”

In the Gallic jargon then fashionable, England was “an insular Bastille of slaves,” and New England “the Vendee of America.”  On the other side, the Federalists returned cheer for cheer,—­looked with true British contempt on the warlike struggles of the restless Frenchman,—­chuckled over the disasters which befell “his little popgun fleets,”—­and damned the Democrats for a pack of poor, dirty, blasphemous cutthroats.  Hate one another was the order of the day.  The