"'Well now, so you be from the old country? Ay--you'll see sights here I
guess.' 'I hope I shall see many.' 'That's a fact.--Why they do say,
that if a poor body contrives to be smart enough to scrape together a few
dollars, that your King George always comes down upon 'em, and takes it
all away. Don't he?' 'I do not remember hearing of such a transaction.' 'I
guess they be pretty close about it.' 'Your papers ben't like ourn, I
reckon? Now we says and prints just what we likes.' 'You spend a good deal
of time in reading the newspapers.' 'And I'd like you to tell me how we
can spend it better. How should freemen spend their time, but looking
after their government, and watching that them fellers as we gives offices
to, doos their duty, and gives themselves no airs?' 'But I sometimes think,
sir, that your fences might be in more thorough repair, and your roads in
better order, if less time was spent in politics.' 'The Lord! to see how
little you knows of a free country? Why, what's the smoothness of a road
put against the freedom of a free-born American? And what does a broken
zig-zag signify, comparable to knowing that the men what we have been
pleased to send up to Congress, speaks handsome and straight, as we
chooses they should?' 'It is from a sense of duty, then, that you all go
to the liquor store to read the papers?' 'To be sure it is, and he'd be no
true-born American as didn't. I don't say that the father of a family
should always be after liquor, but I do say that I'd rather have my son
drunk three times in a week, than not to look after the affairs of his
country,'"

_Hogs_.

"Immense droves of hogs were continually arriving from the country by the
road that led to most of our favourite walks; they were often fed and
lodged in the prettiest valleys, and worse still, were slaughtered beside
the prettiest streams. Another evil threatened us from the same quarter,