"How heartless you must be, Willie, to speak so lightly of such horrible things!" exclaimed Miss Laura with a look of refined disgust. "To my mind, Washington's courtship and wedding, and the pleasant life he led at Mount Vernon, are more entertaining than all your dismal battles."
"And those charming barge-rides by moonlight," chimed in Ella, "that the old Virginia planters used to take when they visited each other up and down the Potomac."
"You are welcome to your courtships and your weddings and your boat-rides by moonlight," cried Willie, turning up his nose; "but I would not have given a good fox-hunt with old Lord Fairfax for any of them: and what a glorious fellow Washington must have been, with his fine horses and his fine dogs, and his jumping twenty-one feet seven inches at a bound!"
"Oh, Willie! how can you be so wanting in respect as to call such a man as Washington 'fellow'?" exclaimed Laura, with a look of pious horror. "I am astonished at you!"
"But I said he was glorious; didn't I now, Miss Over-nice?" retorted Willie.
"Your Cousin Laura, William, is quite right in what she says," observed Uncle Juvinell, with something like severity in his look and tone. "We should never speak of the good and great in other terms than those of esteem and reverence; for the effect of such a habit is to cultivate in ourselves those very qualities of mind and heart which make them worthy of our love and admiration."
Willie was somewhat abashed by this mild rebuke, and apologized in a dumb way by coughing a time or two behind his slate.
"Uncle," inquired Ella, "is transcendentalism an art or a science?"
"I think I can tell you what that is, Ella," Daniel made haste to put in; for he never let an opportunity slip of showing off what he knew to the best advantage.