’The grain
Won’t hurt them,’ answered South again;
‘But they destroy my crop;’

’No doubt;
’Tis fortunate you’ve found it out;
Misfortunes teach, and only they,
You must not sow it in their way;’
‘Nay, you,’ says North, ‘must keep them out;’
‘Did I create them with a snout?’
Asked South demurely; ’as agreed,
The land is open to your seed,
And would you fain prevent my pigs
From running there their harmless rigs? 
God knows I view this compromise
With not the most approving eyes;
I gave up my unquestioned rights
For sake of quiet days and nights;
I offered then, you know ’tis true,
To cut the piece of land in two.’ 
‘Then cut it now,’ growls North;

’Abate
Your heat,’ says South, ’tis now too late;
I offered you the rocky corner,
But you, of your own good the scorner,
Refused to take it:  I am sorry;
No doubt you might have found a quarry,
Perhaps a gold-mine, for aught I know,
Containing heaps of native rhino;
You can’t expect me to resign
My rights’—­

‘But where,’ quoth North, ‘are mine?’
‘Your rights,’ says tother, ’well, that’s funny, I bought the land’—­
‘I paid the money;’
‘That,’ answered South, ’is from the point,
The ownership, you’ll grant, is joint;
I’m sure my only hope and trust is
Not law so much as abstract justice,
Though, you remember, ’twas agreed
That so and so—­consult the deed;
Objections now are out of date,
They might have answered once, but Fate
Quashes them at the point we’ve got to;
Obsta principiis that’s my motto.’ 
So saying, South began to whistle
And looked as obstinate as gristle,
While North went homeward, each brown paw
Clenched like a knot of natural law,
And all the while, in either ear,
Heard something clicking wondrous clear.

To turn now to other matters, there are two things upon which it should seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely in this place,—­the Yankee character and the Yankee dialect.  And, first, of the Yankee character, which has wanted neither open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies in the persons of those unskilful painters who have given to it that hardness, angularity, and want of proper perspective, which, in truth, belonged, not to their subject, but to their own niggard and unskilful pencil.

New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness.  The little self-exiled band which came hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy.  They came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea, even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it.  And surely, if the Greek might boast his Thermopylae, where three hundred men fell in resisting the Persian, we may well be