TRUEMAN. Mr. Loveyet, you will not listen to reason: only attend calmly one moment--[_Reads._]--"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide--" LOVEYET. I tell you I won't hear it. TRUEMAN. Mark all that. [_Reads again._] "Section the first.--All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." Very judicious and salutary, upon my erudition.--"Section the second--" LOVEYET. I'll hear no more of your sections. TRUEMAN. "Section the second.--The House of Representatives--" LOVEYET. They never shall represent me, I promise them. TRUEMAN. Why, you won't hear me out. LOVEYET. I have heard enough to set me against it. TRUEMAN. You have not heard a _quantum sufficit_ to render you competent to give a decisive opinion; besides, you hear with passion and prejudice. LOVEYET. I don't care for that; I say it is a devilish design upon our liberty and property; by my body, it is;--it would reduce us to poverty and slavery. _Enter HUMPHRY, listening._ HUMPHRY. What's that about liberty, and property, and slavery, and popery, and the devil? I hope the pope and the devil an't come to town for to play the devil, and make nigers of us! TRUEMAN. You will have it your own way. LOVEYET. To be sure I will--in short, sir, the old Constitution is good enough for me. HUMPHRY. I wonder what Constitution magnifies. TRUEMAN. The old Constitution!--ha, ha, ha, ha. Superlatively ludicrous and facetious, upon my erudition; and highly productive of risibility--ha, ha, ha. The old Constitution! A very shadow of a government--a perfect _caput mortuum_;--why, one of my schoolboys would make a better: 'tis grown as superannuated, embecilitated, valetudinarianated, invalidated, enervated and dislocated as an old man of sixty odd. LOVEYET. Ah, that's me--that's me--sixty odd, eigh--[_Aside._] I--I--ugh, ugh, I know what you want:--a consolidation and annihilation of the States. TRUEMAN. A consolidation and annihilation!--You certainly have bid defiance to the first rudiments of grammar, and sworn war against the whole body of lexicographers. Mercy on me! If words are to be thus abus'd and perverted, there is an end of the four grand divisions of grammar at once: If consolidation and annihilation are to be us'd synonymously, there is a total annihilation of all the moods, tenses, genders, persons, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, substantives, conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, participles,-- [_Coughs._ HUMPHRY. Oh dear, oh dear,--what a wise man a Schoolmaster is!