“Reasons!” interrupted my father: “oh! sir, to call upon the boy for all the reasons he has heard--But you’ll not pose him: speak up, speak up, Harrington, my boy!” “I’ve nothing to say about reasons, sir.” “No! that was not a fair question,” said my father; “but, my boy, you know on which side you are, don’t you?” “To be sure--on your side, father.” “That’s right--bravo! To know on which side one is, is one great point in life.” “And I can tell on which side every one here is.” Then going round the table, I touched the shoulder of each of the company, saying, “A Jew!--No Jew!” and bursts of applause ensued. When I came to my father again, he caught me in his arms, kissed me, patted my head, clapped me on the back, poured out a bumper of wine, bid me drink his toast, “No Naturalization Bill!--No Jews!” and while I blundered out the toast, and tossed off the bumper, my father pronounced me a clever fellow, “a spirited little devil, who, if I did but live to be a man, would be, he’d engage, an honour to my country, my family, and my _party_.” Exalted, not to say intoxicated, by my father’s praise, when I went to the drawing-room to the ladies, I became rather more eloquent and noisy than my mother thought quite becoming; she could not, indeed, forbear smiling furtively at my wit, when, in answer to some simple country lady’s question of “After all, why should not the Jews be naturalized?” I, with all the pertness of ignorance, replied, “Why, ma’am, because the Jews are naturally an unnatural pack of people, and you can’t naturalize what’s naturally unnatural.” Kisses and cake in abundance followed--but when the company was gone, my mamma thought it her duty to say a few words to me upon politeness, and a few words to my father upon the _too much_ wine he had given me. The reproach to my father, being just, he could not endure; but instead of admitting the truth, he vowed, by Jupiter Ammon, that his boy should never be made a Miss Molly, and to school I should go, by Jupiter Ammon, next morning, plump. Now it was well known in our house, that a sentence of my father’s beginning and ending “_by Jupiter Ammon_” admitted of no reply from any mortal--it was the stamp of fate; no hope of any reversion of the decree: it seemed to bind even him who uttered the oath beyond his own power of revocation. My mother was convinced that even her intercession was vain; so she withdrew, weeping, to the female apartments, where, surrounded by her maids, the decree of fate was reported, but not verbatim, after the manner of the gods and goddesses. The maids and the washerwoman, however, scolded one another very much after their manner, in a council held at midnight, about my clothes; the result of the whole was that “they must be found and packed;” and found and packed at last they were; and the next morning, as decreed, early as Aurora streaked the east, to school I went, very little thinking of her rosy-tipped fingers. CHAPTER III.