cunning fingers? Let them spread them, let them contrive--the tricksters! let the nets become closer and closer daily, which are to conceal their guilt with an easily rent and transparent covering. Let them rejoice in their vileness--let them, with gnashing teeth, defile the throne of truth, which is firmly wound round the hearts of our party with twenty-handed arms! Let them go on patiently. But as for us, I point with luminous finger to the oriflamme of youthful Immortality--for us, I say, away, away with cunning and false shame! away with fraud, away with false appearances! We, my brothers, are German democrats, and let our motto be, 'German perseverance and German truth!'" "Hurrah!" screamed the crowd once more, in ear-piercing chorus, as Strauss descended from the chair, and several approached, and shook hands with him in a friendly manner. Pastor Hehrmann, however, had quietly gone out as soon as the speech was concluded; the rest now followed him; and Strauss, as soon as he joined them, smilingly asked them whether he had been as good as his word. "Deuce take it!" exclaimed Becher, "but that was a capital speech; and how pleased they were with it!" "That was nothing," whispered Strauss; "there were too many of the 'honourables' there, and one must not lay it on too thick with them. But the other day I was in my element; they called upon me for a speech, and I talked such stuff to them that at last I began to be ashamed myself. At the conclusion I compared _our_ president to a comet, and said, that 'as the latter the more it stretches backward the broader it becomes, so shall we in our progress grow and increase in strength, till, like a brilliant comet in the night sky of the opposite party, we shall break our way shining and flaming to the zenith of the firmament.' You should have heard the applause; and the lacemaker from down in Front-street, who has made a couple of thousand dollars or so, and therefore considers himself a wonderfully clever fellow--but who, I may observe in passing, is a dreadful Whig and a blockhead, and had only come to our meeting to hear what was going forward,--went away, saying, 'It's all very well, anybody can deal in abuse.'" "But I don't consider it right to mystify the people in such a way as to their feelings; why not speak to them in clear distinct words? why not endeavour to strengthen them in pure unadulterated truth?"