allowance must be made for difference of soil and climate—­(Oh Lord! thinks I, if he turns in to his orchard, I’m done for; I’ll have to give him the dodge some how or another, through some hole in the fence, that’s a fact—­but he passed on that time.) So it is, said he, with constitutions; ourn will gradually approximate to theirn, and theirn to ourn.  As they lose their strength of executive, they will varge to republicanism, and as we invigorate the form of government, (as we must do, or go to the old boy) we shall tend towards a monarchy.  If this comes on gradually, like the changes in the human body, by the slow approach of old age, so much the better; but I fear we shall have fevers, and convulsion-fits, and cholics, and an everlastin gripin of the intestines first; you and I wont live to see it Sam, but our posteriors will, you may depend.

I don’t go the whole figur with minister, said the Clockmaker, but I do opinionate with him in part.  In our business relations we bely our political principles—­we say every man is equal in the Union, and should have an equal vote and voice in the Government; but in our Banks, Rail Road Companies, Factory Corporations, and so on, every man’s vote is regilated by his share and proportion of stock; and if it warnt so, no man would take hold on these things at all.

Natur ordained it so—­a father of a family is head, and rules supreme in his household; his eldest son and darter are like first leftenants under him, and then there is an overseer over the niggers; it would not do for all to be equal there.  So it is in the univarse, it is ruled by one Superior Power; if all the Angels had a voice in the Government I guess—­Here I fell fast asleep; I had been nodding for some time, not in approbation of what he said, but in heaviness of slumber, for I had never before heard him so prosy since I first overtook him on the Colchester road.  I hate politics as a subject of conversation, it is too wide a field for chit chat, and too often ends in angry discussion.  How long he continued this train of speculation I do not know, but, judging by the different aspect of the country, I must have slept an hour.

I was at length aroused by the report of his rifle, which he had discharged from the waggon.  The last I recollected of his conversation was, I think, about American angels having no voice in the Government, an assertion that struck my drowsy faculties as not strictly true; as I had often heard that the American ladies talked frequently and warmly on the subject of politics, and knew that one of them had very recently the credit of breaking up General Jackson’s cabinet.—­When I awoke, the first I heard was “well, I declare, if that aint an amazin fine shot, too, considerin how the critter was a runnin the whole blessed time; if I han’t cut her head off with a ball, jist below the throat, that’s a fact.”  There’s no mistake in a good Kentucky rifle!  I tell you.  Whose head? said I, in great alarm, whose head, Mr. Slick? for