“I have no interest at all in it. I merely do my duty by exerting myself to the utmost of my power to insure the election of the worst candidates, in order that you may the sooner be cured of your republican notions.”
“If this is really your object, you ought to have been lynched long ago.”
“I tell this merely to my friends.”
“Pray, do not quarrel with him,” interrupted one of the guests, addressing himself to the manufacturer; “our friend has always exerted himself on your side of the question.”
“That is a fact,” observed another. “Though you start from apparently very different premises, and appear to have very different motives, there is really no great difference between you in the end; so I think you had better shake hands, and drink to England and the United States!”
“England and the United States!” echoed the company.
“England and the United States!” repeated our host; “and may the latter never forget what they owe to the former!”
“John Bull to the back-bone!” cried the manufacturer. “All in his own house too!”
“But is it true,” demanded another Englishman, who, I was told, was an ironmonger, “that Mr. *** is not yet naturalized?”
“I am,” said he, “to all intents and purposes a British subject.”