He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.  The “Sir” of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking with some imaginary opponent.

——­America, Sir,—­he exclaimed,—­is the only place where man is full-grown!

He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his little figure to the view of the boarders.

It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was so strange an illustration of the text!

I thought it was time to put in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less cosmopolitan.

I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in England,—­I said.—­An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.

Sir,—­said he,—­it isn’t what a man thinks or says, but when and where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under protest; he lives and dies under protest,—­a tolerated, but not a welcome fact.  Is not free-thinker a term of reproach in England?  The same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting to be on all-fours.  Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he hangs.

——­That’s a good joke,—­said the young fellow John,—­considerin’ it commonly belongs to a female Paddy.

I thought—­I will not be certain—­that Little Boston winked, as if he had been hit somewhere,—­as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If he winked, however, he did not dodge.

A lively comment!—­he said.—­But Rome, in her great founder, sucked the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don’t think what we are doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?