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 goodwill 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,—­will crush the bone in three turns.

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

—­The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six inches in twenty minutes,—­money returned, if it proves unsatisfactory.

I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what’s the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can’t have the things themselves, Sir?  What’s the use of painting the fire round a poor fellow, when you think it won’t do to kindle one under him,—­as they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?

—­What story is that?—­I said.

Why,—­he answered,—­at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or ’5, or somewhere there,—­it’s a traveller’s story, but a mighty knowing traveller he is,—­they had a “heretic” to use up according to the statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n’t quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead painted all over with flames!