shrug, and I am going to tell it all to the world. I
translated that the holy father had been "skylarking" in a
boat, and in gay society had forgotten his vows of frugality
and abstinence and general mortification of the flesh, and had
become, not very drunk, but drunk enough to be dangerous, when
he came ashore and took a horse in his hands, and so upset his
carriage, and gashed his temporal artery, and came to grief,
which is such a casualty as does not happen every day, and I
don't blame people for making the most of it. Then the moral
was pointed, the tale adorned, and the impression deepened,
solemnized, and struck home by the fact that the very horse
concerned in the "casualty" was to be fastened behind our
coach, and the whole population came out with interns and
umbrellas to tie him on,--all but one man, who was deaf, and
stood on the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything that
had been and was still occurring, and yet sorry to give
trouble, and so compromising the matter and making it worse,
as compromisers generally do, by questioning everybody with a
deprecating, fawning air.

Item. We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we
need not be meek about it. I for one am determined to walk up
to people and demand what they are saying at the point of the
bayonet. Deafness, if it must be so, but independence at any
rate.

And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at
Fort-William-Henry Hotel, and all night long through the
sentient woods I hear the booming of Johnson's cannon, the
rattle of Dieskan's guns, and that wild war-whoop, more