—­I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to the sun to ripen well.—­How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge butcher, fifteen stone,—­two hundred and ten pounds,—­good weight,—­steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the Baltimorean,—­one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves down a sand-bank,—­followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can’t help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,—­so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer’s invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw