When we were in Oxford, a dozen or more of the students came to the conclusion that as the General was a little fellow, the admission fee to his entertainments should be paid in the smallest kind of money. They accordingly provided themselves with farthings, and as each man entered, instead of handing in a shilling for his ticket, he laid down forty-eight farthings. The counting of these small coins was a great annoyance to Mr. Stratton, the General’s father, who was ticket seller, and after counting two or three handsful, vexed at the delay which was preventing a crowd of ladies and gentlemen from buying tickets, Mr. Stratton lost his temper and cried out: “Blast your quarter pennies! I am not going to count them! you chaps who haven’t bigger money can chuck your copper into my hat and walk in.” At Cambridge, some of the under-graduates pretended to take offence because our check-taker would not permit them to smoke in the exhibition hall, and one of them managed to involve him in a quarrel which ended with a challenge from the student to the check-taker, who was sure he must fight a duel at sunrise the next morning, and as he expected to be shot, he suffered the greatest mental agony. About midnight, however, after he had been sufficiently scared, I brought him the gratifying intelligence that I had succeeded in settling the dispute. His gratitude at the relief thus afforded, knew no bounds. Mr. Stratton was a genuine Yankee, and thoroughly conversant with the Yankee vernacular, which he used freely. In exhibiting the General, I often said to visitors, that Tom Thumb’s parents and the rest of the family were persons of the ordinary size, and that the gentleman who presided in the ticket-office was the General’s father. This made poor Stratton an object of no little curiosity, and he was pestered with all sorts of questions; on one occasion an old dowager said to him: “Are you really the father of General Tom Thumb?” “Wa’al,” replied Stratton, “I have to support him!” This evasive method of answering is common enough in New England, but the literal dowager had her doubts, and promptly rejoined: “I rather think he supports you!”