The poor Governor doubted his senses, and crossed to stop him—not in time, however. The same gallery-boy shouted, “How’s your mother?”—and Dennis, now completely lost, tried, as his last shot, No. 1, vainly: “Very well, thank you; and you?” I think I must have been undone already. But Dennis, like another Lockhard chose “to make sicker.” The audience rose in a whirl of amazement, rage, and sorrow. Some other impertinence, aimed at Dennis, broke all restraint, and, in pure Irish, he delivered himself of an address to the gallery, inviting any person who wished to fight to come down and do so—stating, that they were all dogs and cowards—that he would take any five of them single-handed, “Shure, I have said all his Riverence and the Misthress bade me say,” cried he, in defiance; and, seizing the Governor’s cane from his hand, brandished it, quarter-staff fashion, above his head. He was, indeed, got from the hall only with the greatest difficulty by the Governor, the City Marshal, who had been called in, and the Superintendent of my Sunday School. The universal impression, of course, was, that the Rev. Frederic Ingham had lost all command of himself in some of those haunts of intoxication which for fifteen years I have been laboring to destroy. Till this moment, indeed, that is the impression in Naguadavick. This number of _The Atlantic_ will relieve from it a hundred friends of mine who have been sadly wounded by that notion now for years—but I shall not be likely ever to show my head there again. No! My double has undone me. We left town at seven the next morning. I came to No. 9, in the Third Range, and settled on the Minister’s Lot, In the new towns in Maine, the first settled minister has a gift of a hundred acres of land. I am the first settled minister in No. 9. My wife and little Paulina are my parish. We raise corn enough to live on in summer. We kill bear’s meat enough to carbonize it in winter. I work on steadily on my _Traces of Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries_, which I hope to persuade Phillips, Sampson & Co. to publish next year. We are very happy, but the world thinks we are undone. FOOTNOTES: [15] From _The Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1859. Republished in the volume, _The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales_ (1868), by Edward Everett Hale (Little, Brown & Co.). [16] Which means, “In the thirteenth century,” my dear little bell-and-coral reader. You have rightly guessed that the question means, “What is the history of the Reformation in Hungary?” A VISIT TO THE ASYLUM FOR AGED AND DECAYED PUNSTERS[17] By Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)