Now, having donated you with
my reasons for being a conservative, sposin' you have a row yourself.
What do you consider best worth seeing here, if you can be said to see
a place when it don't exist? for the English did sartainly deacon the
calf^1 here, that's a fact. They made them smell cotton, and gave them
partikilar Moses, and no mistake."
1 To deacon a calf, is to knock a thing on the head as soon as born or
finished.
"Of the doings of the dead," he said, "all that is around us has a
melancholy interest; but of the living there is a most extraordinary
old fellow that dwells in that white house on the opposite side of the
harbour. He can tell us all the particulars of the two sieges, and
show us the site of most of the public buildings; he is filled with
anecdotes of all the principal actors in the sad tragedies that have
been enacted here; but he labours under a most singular monomania.
Having told these stories so often he now believes that he was present
at the first capture of the fortress, under Colonel Pepperal and the
New England militia in 1745, and at the second in 1754, when it was
taken by Generals Amherst and Wolfe. I suppose he may be ninety years
of age; the first event must have happened therefore nineteen and the
other six years before he was born; in everything else his accuracy of
dates and details is perfectly astonishing.
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