n' up all the 'lection dinner.

Salem! Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

Little Boston was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a boulder
of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if it
ought to shriek. It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

----Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of
its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language
is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.
Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its
cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you
what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A
friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a "bull's
eye," with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from
its contents; you know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb,
while the _core_ or the real watch lies in your hand as naked as a
peeled apple. Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from
one liberty to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the
works, as good as if they were alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and
all the rest. All right except one thing,--there was a confounded little
_hair_ had got tangled round the balance-wheel. So my young Solomon
got a pair of tweezers, and caught hold of the _hair_ very
nicely, and pulled it right out, without touching any of the
wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and the watch had done up twenty-four hours in
double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English language was wound up to
run some thousands of years, I trust; but if everybody is to be pulling
at everything he thinks is a _hair_, our grandchildren will have to
make the discovery that it is a hair-_spring_, and the old Anglo-Norman
soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many other dialects have done
before it. I can't stand this meddling any better than you, Sir. But
we have a great deal to be proud of in the lifelong labors of that old
lexicographer, and we mustn't be ungrateful. Besides, don't let us
deceive ourselves, the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised
rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all,
the language will shape itself by larger forces t