bands, and an explosion of squibs, which, properly engineered, would have prostrated the great Chinese Wall, or the Porcelain Tower itself, —in short, a noise loud enough to make a Revolutionary patriot turn with joy in his coffin,—that I left my Pottery, after dutifully listening to Mrs. Potter's performance of twenty-eight brilliant variations, pour le piano, on "Yankee Doodle," by H. Hertz, (Op. 22,378,)—and sought the punches and patriotism, the joy and the juleps of the Wagonero Cottage. I found you, Bobus, as cool as if Fahrenheit and Reaumur were not bursting around you. Well do I remember the patriarchal appearance which you presented, seated in your own garden, (I think you took the prize for pompions at the county exhibition soon after,) under your own wide-spreading elm-tree, reading for facts in one of those confounded cigars, with which, being proof against them yourself, you were in the habit of poisoning your friends. Solitary and alone, you would have reminded me of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,—three distinguished heads of families rolled into one,—but, surrounded as you were by the fruits of a happy union, the triple comparison was not to be resisted. Notwithstanding your hearty welcome, I was a little dispirited,—for I had come from a childless home. God had taken my sole little lamb,—and many miles away, with none to care for the flowers which in the first winter of our bereavement we had scattered upon her rounded grave, she who was the light of our eyes was sleeping. And while we were thus stricken and lonesome and desolate, your quiver was full and running over. I do not mind saying now, that I envied you, as I distributed the squibs, rockets, and other pyrotechnical fodder which I had brought in my pocket for your flock. I gulped it all down, however, with a pretty good grace, and went to my dinner like a philosopher. Do you not remember that I was particularly brilliant upon that occasion, and that I told my best story only three times in the course of the evening? I flatter myself that I know how to conceal my feelings,—although I punished your claret cruelly, and was sick after it.
I have a notion, dear Don, that I am not writing very coherently, as you, whether pransus or impransus, almost always do. Under agitating circumstances you are cool, and I verily think that you would have reported the earthquake at Lisbon without missing one squashed hidalgo, one drop of the blue blood spilt, one convent unroofed, or one convent belle damaged. Your report would have been minutely circumstantial enough to have found favor with Samuel Johnson, L.L. D., who for so long a time refused to believe in the Portuguese convulsion. But we are not all fit by nature to put about butter-tubs in July. I plead guilty to an excitable temperament. The Bowery youth here speak of a kind of perspiration which, metaphorically, they designate as "a cast-iron sweat." This for the last twelve hours has been my own agonizing style of exudation. And, moreover, the startling event of which I am to write has (to borrow again from the sage Montaigne) created in me "so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without design or order, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make them ashamed of themselves." The novelty of my position causes me to shamble and shuffle, now to pause painfully, and then to dance like a droll. I go out from the presence of my household, that I may vent myself by private absurdities and exclusive antics, I retire into remote corners, that I may grin fearfully, unseen of Mistress Gamp and my small servant. I am possessed by a shouting devil, who is continually prompting me to give the "hip-hip-hurrah!" under circumstances which might split apex and base of several of my most important arteries,—which might bring on apoplexy, epilepsy, suffusion of the brain, or hernia,—which might cause death,—yes, Sir,—death of the mother, father, and child.
