iron-faced and brass-mounted conservative fellow-beings, whose
sentiments in action have seemed to establish as an inevitable
postulate in logic, that a man sired by a hero of '76, must naturally
be damn'd by the heroes of '63; and that a man with Revolutionary blood
in his veins is entirely exempted from all legitimacy to a propensity
for spilling the least drop of that sacred liquid in behalf of a cause
not Revolutionary. It was on Tuesday, my boy, that I met the Honorable
Fernando Fuel, the member-elect from the Sixth Ward, who had come
hither for the express purpose of getting up for himself an entirely
new coat of arms, according to New York Heraldry, and of procuring from
some scholar a recondite couplet that should at once serve, in motto
form, to denote his Revolutionary descent, and express his high moral
patriotism as apart from any partisan desire to see injuries inflicted
upon the Wayward Sisters of his distracted country. He came to me, and
says he:

"Learning, sir, that you are qualified to cull from your extensive
poetical readings some unique couplet appropriate for my approaching
coat-of-arms, I desire you to furnish me with the same, and present
your bill to our Excellent Democratic Organization, of which I am Chief
Indian near--In short, a Sachem local. My patriotism," says he, shading
a slight cough with a black cotton-glove,--"My patriotism is doubted by
none but those imbecile despots who defeated our Excellent Democratic
Organization in the last Presidential election, and are now waging a
bloody and unnatural war for the sake of the Demon of Africa. But my
patriotism hurls back the epithet of 'traitor,' and is clearly
established by the fact that I had an ancestor in the Revolution. It is
my wish," says this plausibly-spoken chap, nodding to a Faro-banker as
he happened to pass at that moment,--"it is my wish that the couplet
should express, neatly and figuratively as it were, the exact degree of
my present patriotism, and its derivation from my Revolutionary
ancestor. Let it represent me clothed in patriotism, as it were."

I thought upon his words for a while, my boy, and then says I:

"For such unspeakable patriotism as yours, good Fuel, there can be no
finer couplet than this:

"'_A painted vest Prince Vortiger had on,_
_That from a naked Pict his grandsire won._'"

The Honorable Fuel turned very crimson in the face with intense
gratification, and says he: "Ha! ha!--ahem! Yes, th