I think I must have been undone already.  But Dennis, like another Lockhard chose “to make sicker.”  The audience rose in a whirl of amazement, rage, and sorrow.  Some other impertinence, aimed at Dennis, broke all restraint, and, in pure Irish, he delivered himself of an address to the gallery, inviting any person who wished to fight to come down and do so—­stating, that they were all dogs and cowards—­that he would take any five of them single-handed, “Shure, I have said all his Riverence and the Misthress bade me say,” cried he, in defiance; and, seizing the Governor’s cane from his hand, brandished it, quarter-staff fashion, above his head.  He was, indeed, got from the hall only with the greatest difficulty by the Governor, the City Marshal, who had been called in, and the Superintendent of my Sunday School.

The universal impression, of course, was, that the Rev. Frederic Ingham had lost all command of himself in some of those haunts of intoxication which for fifteen years I have been laboring to destroy.  Till this moment, indeed, that is the impression in Naguadavick.  This number of The Atlantic will relieve from it a hundred friends of mine who have been sadly wounded by that notion now for years—­but I shall not be likely ever to show my head there again.

No!  My double has undone me.

We left town at seven the next morning.  I came to No. 9, in the Third Range, and settled on the Minister’s Lot, In the new towns in Maine, the first settled minister has a gift of a hundred acres of land.  I am the first settled minister in No. 9.  My wife and little Paulina are my parish.  We raise corn enough to live on in summer.  We kill bear’s meat enough to carbonize it in winter.  I work on steadily on my Traces of Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, which I hope to persuade Phillips, Sampson & Co. to publish next year.  We are very happy, but the world thinks we are undone.

A VISIT TO THE ASYLUM FOR AGED AND DECAYED PUNSTERS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

[From The Atlantic Monthly, January, 1861.  Republished in Soundings from the Atlantic (1864), by Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose authorized publishers are the Houghton Mifflin Company.]

Having just returned from a visit to this admirable Institution in company with a friend who is one of the Directors, we propose giving a short account of what we saw and heard.  The great success of the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth, several of the scholars from which have reached considerable distinction, one of them being connected with a leading Daily Paper in this city, and others having served in the State and National Legislatures, was the motive which led to the foundation of this excellent charity.  Our late distinguished townsman, Noah Dow, Esquire, as is well known, bequeathed a large portion of his fortune to this establishment—­ “being