“When I was a teacher in Marblehead,” drawled I, “I had occasion to wallop a boy with a cowhide.  I made him touch his toes with his fingers and laid on the braid where it would do the most good; the more I whaled him the more he laughed.  I laid on Macduff with a ‘damned be he who first cries hold, enough,’ determination, and yet he laughed.  ‘What you laughing at?’ cried I.  ’Oh, ha, ha, ha, you’re licking the wrong boy,’ giggled the unspeakable scamp.  It’s just that way here.  You gentlemen are licking the wrong boy; I am not General Hall, at all, I am Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant.”  The crowd roared:  “He’s a good un, let’s hear him—­ha, ha, ha, he’s a good un,” and for two hours I had as good-natured an audience as you ever saw.

“You say you don’t want a protective tariff; you don’t want sound money.  Well, you remind me of the man who killed his father, mother, brothers, sisters, and when condemned to death he begged the judge to have mercy upon a poor orphan.  You have killed the tariff twice, and nearly every mill wheel stopped, and you and I had to beg from door to door or live on dry crackers and shin-bones.  Do you want that kind of provender again?  Butler says, ’give us greenbacks by the ton, and everybody will be rich.’  You tried that once and you carried your money to market in a bushel basket, and brought back the dinner you bought with it in a gill dipper.  Do you want any more such times?”

“Be Gorrah,” cried my big Irish friend, “that’s so:  I rimimber it well.  I’d forgut it; the bye’s right, he is.”

“Yes,” I yelled, “Butler says he’ll leave the Republican party out in the cold.  It reminds me of the old farmer who rushed outdoors in his bed-shirt, bareheaded and barefooted in winter, grabbed a barking dog who was disturbing his rest, by the ears; his wife came down to hunt him up.  ‘What on airth, father, you doin’?’ she cried, as she saw his knees knocking together, and his teeth chattering with the cold.  ’I’ve gut the cuss,’ he shouted, ’and I’ll hold him here till he freezes to death.’

“You’ll hold your employers out in the cold, will you?  Well, who’ll freeze to death first if you stop the factories?  The owners who have plenty of money, or you who are dependent upon the work they give you for every cent you get?  General Butler who lives in a palace, and drives a kingly equipage tries to frighten you by painting the bugaboo; ‘the rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer,’ that soon a half-dozen plutocrats will have all the money there is in the world, and then the rest of the people will all starve.  It reminds me of the old farmer who set up such an outrageous looking scarecrow in his field that the crows not only let his present corn alone, but they actually brought back in their terrible fright all the corn they had stolen in the previous ten years.  Are we craven crows to be scared by such windy effigies?”