solutely
intangible to an enemy that took occasion to chase them, while their
courage, when they thought proper to "stand to it," as dame Quickly
says, made them dangerous antagonists. This the reader probably
"guesses" must be brother Jonathan, and he guesses about right. The same
spirit of restless curiosity that prompts a cat, when she sets up her
Ebenezer in a new house, to examine every portion of it, from cellar to
garret, seemed to have possessed our grandpas more strongly than it does
us of the present age.

This national character of ours is owing doubtless to our having been
placed by the hand of Heaven in an immense unexplored region, and was no
doubt much increased by the spirit-stirring scenes of the revolutionary
war, which beheld our "old continentals" one day ferreting out the
long-tailed Hessians from the woods of Saratoga, and another "doing
battle right manfullie" on the plains of South Carolina.

While they of the land service were pushing their advanced posts to the
foot of the Rocky Mountains, our seamen were carrying our striped
bunting into every portion of the navigable world. Such were the people
whose arrival in the Pacific the Spanish commandantes and viceroys
awaited with no small fear and trembling. They knew vaguely that we had
just come off victorious from a long, fierce, and bloody struggle with
powerful England, and while they consigned us pell-mell to the devil, as
"malditos Americanos," they doubted whether we had the additional claim
to go there upon the strength of being heretics. The captains of the
guarda-costas redoubled their vigilance, and sailed in chase of not a
few albatrosses and whale-spouts, such was the zeal that animated them.

I should have described these redoubtable crafts, the guarda-costas,
before--they were armed vessels of different classes, varying from light
frigates down to mere gunboats, and were distributed along the coasts to
protect trade, and prevent smuggling.

When however these formidable strangers did arrive, the readiness with
which they conformed to the numerous, and in most cases vexatious, port
regulations, their quiet behavior on shore, and the many novelties and
luxuries that they freely distributed to the port officers, completely
blinded them to the instinctive disposition to trade that characterizes
my beloved countrymen, especially the New Englanders, who were the first
to carry our flag into the Pacific, as they were also the first to
d