and stung them.—Where the Jolly Dogs then went.—The Wheel well started. [Illustration: BRITANNIA FORCES TEA ON HER TROUBLESOME CHILD.] There is always a strange curiosity to see an express-train go by. Everybody crowds up to witness the great red eye glare and scowl, as if it resented the safe inspection which those on the platform give it, as it rushes past. Every one, young and old, watches, with concentrated interest, the momentarily visible heads of the passengers, dusty, dishevelled, and hot, seen through the passing windows, as the train pants, hurrying around a curve, into the darkness. Not a little of the interest is enhanced by the feeling that it will bring up safely far away in a metropolitan depot, and there decant its well-shaken, effervescing freight. So stand we, surrounded by our readers, on the platform of history, to see the American Revolution rush along upon its own way, grim, earnest, resolute, tracking its onward march towards the great end for which it set out. “Le genie,” says Buffon, “c’est la patience.” If the naturalist’s definition be true, the colonial patience constituted a most remarkable exhibition of genius. In 1763 the greater part of the colonists were the descendants of men who had escaped from hard civil and ecclesiastical exactions in their home lands, and had set up for themselves in an unappropriated field. From this new lot they sought to extract, by the difficult labor of one hand, its reluctant yield for subsistence, and by the other to keep off from it enemies ready to take and cut their crops. Uninvited pensioners, called Governors, were soon sent out, in showy tinsel, to tithe their laboriously earned products, and to fence in by golden bars wrought by the settlers the royal prerogatives and pretensions, from which those settlers had endeavored to rid themselves by self-exile. In some of the Colonies mint and cummin were extracted for a church, between whose ecclesiastical detectives and themselves they had essayed to put three thousand miles of disagreeable pickle, with rods enough in it to terrify even lean curates with little to throw up. The English civil list, portioned off upon the young emigrants in the shape of office-holders, sucked up—like an old toper in a newly established tavern—the very best that the place afforded. These officials thus suffered at first to partake of the generous, open-house entertainment, soon cast around them to effect a permanent claim for free commons, where they had been only tolerated by an unselfish hospitality. As no one likes to be eaten out or evicted from his own house and home, even by assumed and softly spoken friends, these self-imposed guests were naturally regarded as poor, proud relatives, who came unbidden at first, put on company airs, insisted on company fare, needed extra waiting on, bred disaffection among the servants, and set up the children to fancies beyond the parental means or authority.