Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, et al.  Your tribe chased them put of the country for their religion’s sake; promised them death if they came back; for your ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of the sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire that highest and most precious of boons, freedom for every man on this broad continent to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience—­and they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous Quakers to interfere with it.  Your ancestors broke forever the chains of political slavery, and gave the vote to every man in this wide land, excluding none!—­none except those who did not belong to the orthodox church.  Your ancestors —­yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless, they gave us religious liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political liberty to vote as the church required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn one, am here to do my best to help you celebrate them right.

The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine.  Your people were pretty severe with her you will confess that.  But, poor thing!  I believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died she went to the same place which your ancestors went to.  It is a great pity, for she was a good woman.  Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.  I don’t really remember what your people did with him.  But they banished him to Rhode Island, anyway.  And then, I believe, recognizing that this was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took pity on him and burned him.  They were a hard lot!  All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine!  Your people made it tropical for them.  Yes, they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal with them that there hasn’t been a witch and hardly a halter in our family from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years.  The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—­for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.  I’m not one of your sham meerschaums that you can color in a week.  No, my complexion is the patient art of eight generations.  Well, in my own time, I had acquired a lot of my kin—­by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and another —­and was getting along very well.  Then, with the inborn perversity of your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away from me.  And so, again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my blood flows in the veins of any living being who is marketable.