Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides: Speaker Series Number 2, Revised and Enlarged Edition
General
Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides: Speaker Series Number 2, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Recitations
No, sir! no, sir! We are above all this. Let the Highland clansman,
half-naked, half-civilized, half-blinded by the peat-smoke of his
cavern, have his hereditary enemy and his hereditary enmity, and keep
the keen, deep, and precious hatred, set on fire of hell, alive, if
he can; let the North American Indian have his, and hand it down
from father to son, by Heaven knows what symbols of alligators, and
rattlesnakes, and war-clubs smeared with vermilion and entwined with
scarlet; let such a country as Poland,--cloven to the earth, the armed
heel on the radiant forehead, her body dead, her soul incapable to
die,--let her remember the "wrongs of days long past;" let the lost
and wandering tribes of Israel remember theirs--the manliness and the
sympathy of the world may allow or pardon this to them;--but shall
America, young, free, prosperous, just setting out on the highway of
heaven, "decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just begins
to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and joy,"
shall she be supposed to be polluting and corroding her noble and
happy heart, by moping over old stories of stamp act, and tea tax, and
the firing of the Leopard upon the Chesapeake in a time of peace? No,
sir! no, sir! a thousand times, no! Why, I protest I thought all that
had been settled. I thought two wars had settled it all. What else was
so much good blood shed for, on so many more than classical fields
of Revolutionary glory? For what was so much good blood more lately
shed, at Lundy's Lane, at Fort Erie, before and behind the lines at
New Orleans, on the deck of the Constitution, on the deck of the Java,
on the lakes, on the sea, but to settle exactly these "wrongs of past
days?" And have we come back sulky and sullen from the very field of
honor? For my country, I deny it.
MURDER WILL OUT.--_Daniel Webster._
An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in
his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder, for mere pay.
The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or
a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the
assassin's purpose to make sure work. He explores the wrist for the
pulse. He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is
accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the
window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done
the murder;--no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The _secret_
is his own,--and it is safe!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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