The poor relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the little gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.  She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she had the toothache,—­and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter the wind blows from, she will catch her “death o’ cold.”

The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.—­The boarders was gettin’ uneasy,—­she said,—­and some of ’em would go, she mistrusted, if he talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all her livin’ depended on her boarders, and she was sure there wasn’t any of ’em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them that never liked to hear about such things, except on Sundays.

The little gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an unconscious movement,—­a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time, when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her mate by these and other bird-like graces.—­My dear Madam,—­he said,—­I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to which I am totally indifferent.—­I don’t doubt he meant this; but a day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice uttering itself aloud, thus:—­

—­It must be done, Sir!—­he was saying,—­it must be done!  Our religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in politics;—­it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man,—­and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor’s interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his lookout;—­perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other candidates; and I don’t doubt he’s often right, Sir!  Just so a man’s soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn’t do, Sir, or it won’t do long, to call him “schismatic” and “heretic” and those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have left us to help along “peace and good-will to men”!

As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee advertisement like this!—­(the little gentleman laughed fiercely as he uttered the words,—­)

—­Patent thumb-screws, warranted to crush the bone in three turns.

—­The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet,—­only five dollars!