—­What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?—­said the divinity-student, interrupting him.

Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,—­he answered,—­the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real manhood were ready.

I hope they will come to something yet,—­said the divinity-student.

Irreclaimable, Sir,—­irreclaimable!—­said the Little Gentleman.—­Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.  When you can get the bitter out of the partridge’s thigh, you can make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race, Sir,—­nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation, kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away, according to the programme.

Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-and-by, Sir,—­as sound as a woodchuck,—­as sound as a musquash!

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of ’em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any time these hundred years!  That’s all I claim for Boston,—­that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.

—­And the grand emporium of modesty,—­said the divinity-student, a little mischievously.

Oh, don’t talk to me of modesty!—­answered the Little Gentleman,—­I ’m past that!  There is n’t a thing that was ever said or done in Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n’t thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over it.—­No, Sir,—­show me any other place that is, or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and mammas for inquisitors,—­and the cold shoulder, instead of the “dry pan and the gradual fire,” the punishment of “heresy”!

—­We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,—­said the young Marylander, good-naturedly.—­But I suppose you can’t forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of numbers,—­tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?

Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis of the Union.  Why don’t you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the Washington column?  Why don’t you get that lady off from Battle Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,—­you live too well to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but you—­if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.