every comer was freely welcome.
I suppose boys, though, were not allowed at the dinner; all that my boy
saw of the barbecue were the heaps of loaves and hams left over, that
piled the floor in one of the rooms to the ceiling.

He remained an ardent Whig till his eleventh year, when his father left
the party because the Whigs had nominated, as their candidate for
president, General Taylor, who had won his distinction in the Mexican
war, and was believed to be a friend of slavery, though afterwards he
turned out otherwise. My boy then joined a Free-Soil club, and sang
songs in support of Van Buren and Adams. His faith in the purity of the
Whigs had been much shaken by their behavior in trying to make capital
out of a war they condemned; and he had been bitterly disappointed by
their preferring Taylor to Tom Corwin, the favorite of the anti-slavery
Whigs. The "Biglow Papers" and their humor might not have moved him from
his life-long allegiance, but the eloquence of Corwin's famous speech
against the Mexican war had grounded him in principles which he could
not afterwards forsake. He had spoken passages of that speech at school;
he had warned our invading hosts of the vengeance that has waited upon
the lust of conquest in all times, and has driven the conquerors back
with trailing battle-flags. "So shall it be with yours!" he had
declaimed. "You may carry them to the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras;
they may float in insolent triumph in the halls of Montezuma; but the
weakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer, can call down a power
against you before which the iron hearts of your warriors shall be
turned into ashes!" It must have been a terrible wrench for him to part
from the Whig boys in politics, and the wrench must have been a sudden
one at last; he was ashamed of his father for opposing the war, and
then, all at once, he was proud of him for it, and was roaring out songs
against Taylor as the hero of that war, and praising Little Van, whom he
had hitherto despised as the "Fox of Kinderhook."

The fox was the emblem (_totem_) of the Democrats in the campaigns of
1840 and 1844; and in their processions they always had a fox chained to
the hickory flag-poles which they carried round on their wagons,
together with a cock, reconciled probably in a common terror. The Whigs
always had the best processions; and one of the most signal days of my
boy's life was the day he spent in following round a Henry Clay
procession, w