It was too late.—­A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,—­but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,—­but it lay there under all their culture.  That is one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled them with.

—­Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English dictionary,—­said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as sitting at the right upper corner of the table.

I turned and looked him full in the face,—­for the pure, manly intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of character.—­I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the matter of voice.—­Hear this.

Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in her father’s chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl come and live in her father’s house.  So the child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children became successively inmates of the lady’s dwelling; and now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing, one of that child’s children and one of her grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes her peaceful days.—­Three generations linked together by so light a breath of accident!

I liked—­the sound of this youth’s voice, I said, and his look when I came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had something better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;—­it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:  hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen’s families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen’s used to serve their owner,—­to draw nails with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate’s deck and bowl his broadsides into the “Gadlant Thudnder-bomb,” or any forty-port-holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron compliments.—­I don’t know what put this into my head, for it was not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.