New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man—a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher.
“I was subject to your government once for sixteen months,” my neighbor said.
“Really! Where?”
“Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too.”
“Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But I wasn‘t a pirate.”
With over-great energy I struck in, “Of course not.”
My Neighbor.—“No; I was a slaver.”
Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America.