I don’t know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools say,—­rejoined the Little Gentleman.—­If importing most dry goods made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for ’em.—­Mr. Webster could n’t spell, Sir, or would n’t spell, Sir,—­at any rate, he did n’t spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language!—­the blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n’t in the Colonial dictionaries!  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance!  That was in ’43, and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;—­but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes, yes,—­it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God’s permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the occidental,—­this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,—­must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world’s destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fast-rate,—­said the young fellow whom the boarders call John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.  Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.  Recollects he had a glazed ’lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them ’lection-buns are no go,—­said the young man John, so called.—­I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo’penny bun in the mornin’, an’ he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as big as a football, and his feedin’ ’s spilt for that day.  That’s the way to stop off a young one from eatin’ up all the ’lection dinner.