I don't know what _some folks think_ so well as I know what _some fools
say_,--rejoined Little Boston.--If importing most dry goods made the
best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for 'em.--Mr.
Webster couldn't spell, Sir, or wouldn't spell, Sir,--at any rate, he
didn't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of
some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have
inherited from our English fathers,--language!--the blood of the soul,
Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know
what a word is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage
at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor
and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the
Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught
people how to spell a word that wasn't in the Colonial dictionaries!
_R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance!_ That was in '43,
and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it
with their muskets;--but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that
the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!
Yes, yes, yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys
got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
_Independence_ and _Union!_ I tell you what, there are a thousand lives,
aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is
worth speaking.
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