What’s done, Sam, can’t be helped, there is no use in cryin over spilt milk, but still one can’t help a thinkin on it.  But I dont love schisms and I dont love rebellion.

Our revolution has made us grow faster and grow richer; but Sam, when we were younger and poorer, we were more pious and more happy.  We have nothin fixed either in religion or politics.  What connection there ought to be atween Church and State, I am not availed, but some there ought to be as sure as the Lord made Moses.  Religion when left to itself, as with us, grows too rank and luxuriant.  Suckers and sprouts, and intersecting shoots, and superfluous wood make a nice shady tree to look at, but where’s the fruit, Sam? that’s the question—­where’s the fruit?  No; the pride of human wisdom, and the presumption it breeds will ruinate us.  Jefferson was an infidel, and avowed it, and gloried in it, and called it the enlightenment of the age.  Cambridge College is Unitarian, cause it looks wise to doubt, and every drumstick of a boy ridicules the belief of his forefathers.  If our country is to be darkened by infidelity, our Government defied by every State, and every State ruled by mobs—­then, Sam, the blood we shed in our revolution will be atoned for in the blood and suffering of our fellow citizens.  The murders of that civil war will be expiated by a political suicide of the State.

I am somewhat of father’s opinion, Said the Clockmaker, though I dont go the whole figur with him, but he needn’t have made such an everlastin touss about fixin that are British officer’s flint for him, for he’d a died of himself by this time, I do suppose, if he had a missed his shot at him.  Praps we might have done a little better, and praps we mightn’t, by sticken a little closer to the old constitution.  But one thing I will say, I think arter all, your Colony Government is about as happy and as a good a one as I know on.  A man’s life and property are well protected here at little cost, and he can go where he likes and do what he likes provided he don’t trespass on his neighbor.

I guess that’s enough for any on us, now aint it?

No.  XXXI

Gulling a Blue Nose.

I allot, said Mr. Slick, that the Blue Noses are the most gullible folks on the face of the airth—­rigular soft horns, that’s a fact.  Politicks and such stuff set ’em a gapin, like children in a chimbley corner listenen to tales of ghosts, Salem witches, and Nova Scotia snowstorms; and while they stand starin and yawpin all eyes and mouth, they get their pockets picked of every cent that’s in ’em.  One candidate chap says “Feller citizens, this country is goin to the dogs hand over hand; look at your rivers, you have no bridges; at your wild lands, you have no roads; at your treasury, you hante got a cent in it:  at your markets, things dont fetch nothin; at your fish, the Yankees ketch ’em all.  There’s nothin behind