DEAR CONTINENTAL: 

I am a man that rides around over the ‘kedn’try.’  In the little village where I am now tarrying, the school-house bell is ringing to call together the members of that ancient institution peculiar to villages, the debating society.  A friend informs me that the time-honored questions—­Should capital punishment be abolished?—­Did Columbus deserve more praise than Washington?—­Is art more pleasing to the eye than nature?—­have each had their turn in their regular rotation, and that the question for to-night is—­as you might suppose—­Has the Indian suffered greater wrongs at the hands of the White man than the Negro?  As I have a distinct recollection of having thoroughly investigated and zealously declaimed on each of the above topics in days lang syne, I shall excuse myself from attendance this evening, on the ground that I am already extensively informed on the subject in hand, and my mind is fully made up.  But I hereby acknowledge my indebtedness to the good fellow who told me the object of the ringing of the bell—­for he has unconsciously started up some of the most amusing recollections of my life.  Sitting here alone in my room, I have just taken a hearty laugh over a circumstance that had well-nigh given me the slip.  The question was the same Negro-Indian-White-man affair.  One of the orators, having, a long time previously, seen a picture in an old ‘jography’ of some Indians making a hubbub on board certain vessels, and reading under it, Destruction of Tea in Boston Harbor, brought up the circumstance, and insisting with great earnestness that the white man had received burning wrongs at the hands of the Indian, and that the latter had no reason at all to complain, dwelt with great emphasis on the ruthless destruction of the white man’s tea in Boston Harbor by the latter, in proof of his ‘point.’

I remember also a debating society in the little village of R——­, which numbered some really very worthy and intelligent members, but of course included some that were otherwise, among whom was a silly young fellow, who had mistaken his proper calling—­(he should have been a wood-chopper), and was suffering under an attack at medicine.  The question for debate on one occasion was—­Is conscience an infallible guide?  Being expected to take part in the discussion, he was bent on thorough preparation, and ransacked his preceptor’s professional library—­(almost as poor a place as a lawyer’s) for a work on conscience.  He found abundance of matter, however, for a lengthy chapter on the subject, as he supposed, occurring in several of the dusty octavos, and he thumbed the leaves with most patient assiduity.  He had misspelled the word however, and was reading all the while on consciousness—­a subject which would very naturally occur in some departments of medicine.  But it was all one to him, he didn’t see the difference, and the ridiculous display he made to us of his ‘cramming’