After cracking his whip twice or thrice, he resumed, “My father, (he is gone, God bless him,) was an honest shoemaker in the town of Barnstable, where I was born and reared.  Being poor, he could not give me much schooling; but we lived comfortably, and enjoyed the respect of the town people.  I assisted him at his trade of making shoes until I reached the age of two and twenty, being esteemed a skillful mechanic.  Joining the Barnstable Invincibles, a very disorderly militia company, I was twice elected its captain, which was considered a very good practical joke, the militia there being in very bad odor with everybody but the young damsels of the town.  To my military title, then, I owe one of the most fortunate circumstances of my life-that of getting a wife.  And this wife, though she bore my title the strongest love, was quite as good as I deserved.  In due time we were blessed with one, and then another little Potter, and I began to thank heaven for making me the happiest of men.  A snug little home was the result of frugality and industry, and peace reigned in it.  But my wife was vain of my military reputation, which she regarded as a hinge for taking a higher position in the world.  I must tell you that she cut two clever speeches from an old newspaper, declaring that I must study them, so that with a few alterations, (an art well understood by our clergymen and politicians,) I could set up for a public man, making them apply to all great questions with equal force.

“Wife was of a good, puritanical family, and, as I afterwards had reason to know, well understood how to push her husband up in the world.  I got the speeches down without the slightest difficulty.”  Here the major wet his organs of speech with a little of something he kept in a small flask he drew from his breast-pocket.  “They were fu l of blaze.  In truth, I may say without fear of contradiction, that a dozen patriots might have found room to roll up in them and die gloriously.  Still, it didn’t seem to me much for a man to get a speech into his head; so, after getting another, I found no difficulty in getting twenty, all of which were applicable to general subjects.  The Tippecanoe fever then began to spread with great virulency, and such was the power of its contagion that John Crispin threw away his lapstone, and Peter Vulcan hung up his anvil, and both went about the country delivering themselves of great speeches, with which they deluded the simple-minded villagers, who forced greatness upon them at every step.  And so forcibly did the opinion that they were great men take root with the good natured mass, that the great men of the newspapers, and the kind-hearted critics, who are greater, seconded the opinion, and set them down for wonders.  The ambition of my wife now knew no bounds.  She insisted that I should go to the next political meeting, and then and there deliver one of the speeches I had got into my head, and which I had twice spoken before her,