been honoured with any public notice whatever, and I attended the
meeting uninvited.

The Yankees are excellent orators; they are born without bashfulness;
they are taught to speak pieces in school from their childhood; they
pronounce each word distinctly; they use correctly the rising
inflection and the falling inflection. Moreover, they are always in
deadly earnest; there is another miserable world awaiting their
arrival. Their humorists are the most unhappy of men. You may smile
when you read their jokes, but when you see the jokers you are more
inclined to weep. With pain and sorrow they grind, like Samson, at
the jokers' mill all the days of their lives.

The meeting was held in the new two-storey school-house.

Deacon Beaumont took the chair--my chair--and Mr Curtis was
appointed secretary. I began to hate Deacon Beaumont, as also Mr.
Curtis, who was the only other teacher present; it was evident they
were going to put him in my place.

Each speaker on rising put his left hand in the side pocket of his
pants. I was not mentioned by name, but nevertheless I was given
clearly to understand that I had been reared in a land whose people
are under the dominion of a tyrannical monarch and a bloated
aristocracy; that therefore I had never breathed the pure air of
freedom, and was unfitted to teach the children of the Great Republic.

Mr. Tucker, an influential citizen, moved finally that the school
managers be instructed to engage a Mr. Sellars, of Dresden, as
teacher at the West Joliet School. He said Mr. Sellars was a young