“What in natur is that, when it’s biled and the skin took off?” asked Mr. Slick.
“Why is it possible you don’t know that? Have you forgotten that common schoolboy phrase?”
“Guess I do know; but it don’t tally jist altogether nohow, as it were. Known as a Socialist, isn’t it?”
“If, Sir,” said Mr. Hopewell, with much earnestness, “if instead of ornamenting your conversation with cant terms, and miserable slang, picked up from the lowest refuse of our population, both east and west, you had cultivated your mind, and enriched it with quotations from classical writers, you would have been more like an Attache, and less like a peddling clockmaker than you are.”
“Minister,” said Mr. Slick, “I was only in jeest, but you are in airnest. What you have said is too true for a joke, and I feel it. I was only a sparrin’; but you took off the gloves, and felt my short ribs in a way that has given me a stitch in the side. It tante fair to kick that way afore you are spurred. You’ve hurt me considerable.”
“Sam, I am old, narvous, and irritable. I was wrong to speak unkindly to you, very wrong indeed, and I am sorry for it; but don’t teaze me no more, that’s a good lad; for I feel worse than you do about it. I beg your pardon, I—”
“Well,” said Mr. Slick, “to get back to what we was a sayin’, for you do talk like a book, that’s a fact; ‘noscitur a sociis,’ says you.”
“Ay, ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ as the old maxim goes. Now, Sam, who supported the Whigs?”
“Why, let me see; a few of the lords, a few of the gentry, the repealers, the manufacturin’ folks, the independents, the baptists, the dissentin’ Scotch, the socialists, the radicals, the discontented, and most of the lower orders, and so on.”
“Well, who supported the Tories?”