place, the Monument was as plumb as
ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, and the Republican Party
took its morning tea and toast in peace and safety. On the whole, it
must be considered a wonderful escape. Since Partridge's time there
had been no such prophecies,--since Miller's, no such perverse
disobligingness in the event.

But what had happened? Why, the Democratic Young Men's Celebration, to
be sure, and Mr. Choate's Oration.

The good city of Boston in New England, for we know not how many
years, had been in the habit of celebrating the National Birthday,
first, with an oration, as became the Athens of America, and second,
with a dinner, as was meet in the descendants of Teutonic forefathers.
The forenoon's oration glorified us in the lump as a people, and every
man could reckon and appropriate his own share of credit by the simple
arithmetical process of dividing the last census by the value he set
upon himself, a divisor easily obtained by subtracting from the total
of inhabitants in his village the number of neighbors whom he
considered ciphers. At the afternoon's dinner, the pudding of praise
was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk
by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief
Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel
of the Boston Regiment to Julius Caesar; and everybody went home happy
from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the
last Z in Lempriere.

Gradually matters took a new course; the Union was suddenly supposed
to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the
Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the
rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his
private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in
young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms
of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber
at a convention of the Catawampusville Come-outers, or of Pyrophagus
Quattlebum at a training of the Palmetto Plug-Uglies,--neither of
which was skin-deep. The dinners became equally dreary. Did the eye of
a speaker light on the national dish of beans, he was reminded of the
languid pulse of the sentiment of union; did he see a broiled chicken,
it called up to his mind's eye the bird of our _un_common
country, with the gridiron on his breast, liable to be reduced at any
moment to th