"They reckon themselves here a chalk above us Yankees, but I guess
they have a wrinkle or two to grow afore they progress ahead on us
yet. If they hain't got a full cargo of conceit here, then I never
seed a load, that's all. They have the hold chock full, deck piled up
to the pump handles, and scuppers under water. They larnt that of the
British, who are actilly so full of it, they remind me of Commodore
Trip. When he was about half-shaved he thought everybody drunk but
himself. I never liked the last war, I thought it unnateral, and
that we hadn't ought to have taken hold of it at all, and so most of
our New England folks thought; and I wasn't sorry to hear Gineral
Dearborne was beat, seein' we had no call to go into Canada. But when
the Guerriere was captivated by our old Ironsides, the Constitution,
I did feel lifted up amost as high as a stalk of Varginny corn among
Connecticut middlins; I grew two inches taller I vow, the night I
heerd that news. Brag, says I, is a good dog, but Holdfast is better.
The British navals had been a-braggin' and a-hectorin' so long, that
when they landed in our cities, they swaggered e'enamost as much as
Uncle Peleg (big Peleg as he was called), and when he walked up the
centre of one of our narrow Boston streets, he used to swing his arms
on each side of him, so that folks had to clear out of both foot
paths; he's cut, afore now, the fingers of both hands agin the shop
windows on each side of the street.
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