k; and another has ceased to cultivate any hair at all
over the vertex or crown of the head. So I am perfectly willing to
believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's moustache and whiskers
is constitutional and not pigmentary. But I can't think why he got so
angry.

The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it was
all over by the time the other end of the table found out there was a
disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be seen
resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he struck. So
you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was not interrupted
during the time implied by these _ex-post-facto_ remarks of mine, but
for some ten or fifteen seconds only.

He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started again.
The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself more than
anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he were talking
with some imaginary opponent.

----America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is
full-grown!

He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
little figure to the view of the boarders.

It was next to impossible to keep from laughing. The commentary was so
strange an illustration of the text!

I thought it was time to put in a word; for I have lived in foreign
parts, and am more or less cosmopolitan.

I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have in
England,--I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and
politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did,
and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.

Sir,--said he,--it isn't what a man thinks or says, but when and where
and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking
sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a
tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he
lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a welcome fact. Is
not _free-thinker_ a term of reproach in England? The same idea in
the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it
_antagonistically_, and in the soul of an American to whom it is
congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element
blended with _all_ his thoughts, a natural move