cheerful encouragement to their own struggle against the
aristocratic Federalists, and would allow no sanguinary irregularities
to divert their sympathy from the great Democratic triumph abroad. The
gay folds of the tricolor which floated over them seemed to shed upon
their heads a mild influence of that Gallic madness that led them into
absurdities we could not now believe, were they not on record. The
fashions, sartorial and social, of the French were affected; amiable
Yankees called each other _citizen_, invented the feminine _citess_,
and proposed changing our old calendar for the Ventose and Fructidor
arrangement of the one and indivisible republic. (We wish they had
adopted their admirable system of weights and measures.) Divines are
said to have offered up thanks to the Supreme Being for the success of
the good _Sans-culottes_. At all events, their victories were celebrated
by civic festivals and the discharge of cannon; the English flag was
burned as a sacrifice to the Goddess of Liberty; a French frigate took
a prize off the Capes of the Delaware, and sent her in to Philadelphia;
thousands of the populace crowded the wharves, and, when the British
colors were seen reversed, and the French flying over them, burst into
exulting hurras. When a report came that the Duke of York was a prisoner
and shown in a cage in Paris, all the bells of Philadelphia rang peals
of joy for the downfall of tyrants. Here is the story of a civic _fete_
given at Reading, in Massachusetts, which we extract from a newspaper of
the time as a specimen of the Gallo-Yankee absurdities perpetrated by
our grandfathers:--

"The day was ushered in by the ringing of the bells, and a salute of
fifteen discharges from a field-piece. The American flag waved in the
wind, and the flag of France over the British in inverted order. At noon
a large number of respectable citizens assembled at Citizen Raynor's,
and partook of an elegant entertainment. After dinner, Captain Emerson's
military company in uniform assembled and escorted the citizens to the
meeting-house, where an address pertinent to the occasion was delivered
by the Rev. Citizen Prentiss, and united prayers and praises were
offered to God, and several hymns and anthems were well sung; after
which they returned in procession to Citizen Raynor's, where three
farmers, with their frocks and utensils, and with a tree on their
shoulders, were escorted by the military company formed in a hollow
squa