e
at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor
and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the
Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught
people how to spell a word that wasn't in the Colonial dictionaries!
_R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance!_ That was in '43,
and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it
with their muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that
the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!
Yes, yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys
got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
_Independence_ and _Union!_ I tell you what, there are a thousand lives,
aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is
worth speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to
play tricks with it. We never make a new word till we have made a new
thing or a new thought, Sir! When we shaped the new mould of this
continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated
the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The
cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--this
thirty-masted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little spray
over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world's
destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his
high chair;--that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fust-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
call John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he
remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him
take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting
on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a
glazed 'lection-bun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the
Common. Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off
from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them 'lection buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.--I
know the trick. Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an' he
downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as
big as a football, and his feedin's sp'ilt for _that_ day. That's the
way to stop off a young one from eati