lugged out the dagger before the upturned smiling eyes of his patient compeers, and Sheridan—­or was it Fox?—­begged the gentleman to tell him where the fork was to be had which belonged to the knife, why, even that were not only unworthy of the man, but so utterly unlike him, for he never indulged in rhetoric or rhodomontade or claptrap, that one would be inclined to think he was beside himself, or had been dining out, like Daniel Webster when he proposed, in the Senate Chamber, to plant our starry banner on the outermost verge, the Ultima Thule, of our disputed territory, heedless of consequences.  Both Pierpont and Calhoun certainly forgot the injunction to be “temperate in all things”; and allow me to add, that, in my judgment, it mattered little who was with, or who against them, after they had once set the lance in rest, with a windmill in view,—­they only spurred the harder for opposition, and lashed out all the more vehemently for being cheered, even by the lowliest.  Encouragement and opposition were alike to both, after the rowels were set, and their beavers closed.

At the time I speak of, Mr. Pierpont and his brother-in-law, Mr. Joseph L. Lord, kept house together on a street running down hill back of the State-House,—­Hancock Street, if I do not mistake.  They had always two or three boarders, and sometimes more, and among them Erastus A. Lord, a brother of Joseph, and myself.  With these, and with the neighbors,—­the whole neighborhood, I might say, and with all their visiting-list,—­our friend Pierpont was an oracle from the first, and in the church and parish, after he had been set up in the pulpit, an idol.  It was thought presumptuous for anybody to differ with him upon any subject.  Whatever he said, or thought, or did, was never to be questioned,—­never!  His opinions were maxims, his utterances apothegms, his lightest word authority.  And the worst of it all, and the hardest thing for me to stomach, was, that in all our controversies, for a long time, if he was not always right, and I always wrong, I was quite sure to come out second best, in the judgment of his friends and worshippers, who had no sympathy for anybody who ventured to tilt with their champion.  Nevertheless I persisted, and, not standing much in awe of the pedant and the pedagogue, however much I admired the logician and the poet or the lawyer, I lost no opportunity of asserting my independence, and took, I am afraid, a sort of malicious pleasure in showing that I had views and opinions of my own, and was determined to do my own thinking, come what might.  For a while this operated against me,—­if not always with Mr. Pierpont, certainly with all his immediate personal friends and family; but in time, I believe, he began to like me the better for my presumption, or foolhardiness, in battling the watch with him, whenever he laid down a proposition, with a calm, dictatorial air, which did not strike me at first either as clearly self-evident, or, after a thorough investigation, as indisputably true, so that I do on my conscience believe that I was fast growing, not only unmanageable, but unbearable.