“ One day, Mik happened to come unfortunately in contact with a stray grizzly fellow, who, doubtless in the indulgence of an adventurous spirit, had wandered away from the Rocky Mountains, and formed a league for mutual protection with his black and more effeminate brethren of the swamp. Mik saluted him, as he approached, with an ounce ball in the forehead, to avenge half a dozen of his best dogs, who lay in fragments around; the bullet flattened upon his impenetrable skull, merely infuriating the monster, and before Mik could reload, it was upon him. ”

“ Is it possible you never heard the story of the goose with the golden egg?”
“To be sure,” replied Goody, opening her eyes wider than ever; “to be sure I have, to be sure, Mr. Bob—to be sure. But your hen, you know, is not a goose.”
“That is very true, Mrs. Brown; but here is another question. If a goose can lay a golden egg, why can’t a hen lay a silver one?” ”

“ I’m decidedly opposed to the amendment: it is contrary to the principles of freemen and the principles of responsibility. Tell it to your children, Mr. Speaker, and to your children’s children, that freedom is not to be bartered, like Esau, for a mess of potash. Liberty is the everlasting birthright of the grand community of nature’s freemen. Sir, the member from Boston talks of horse-shoes, but I hope we shall stand up for our rights. If we only stand up for our rights, Mr. Speaker, our rights will stand up for us, and we shall all stand uprightly without shivering or shaking. ”

“ Kit came in at a long, sweeping trot, and stopt suddenly at the crowd.
“Well,” said Blossom, “let me look at him; maybe he’ll do to plough.”
“Examine him!” said Peter, taking hold of the bridle close to the mouth. “He’s nothing but a tacky. He an’t as pretty a horse as Bullet, I know; but he’ll do. Start ’em together for a hundred and fifty mile; and if Kit an’t twenty mile ahead of him at the coming out, any man may take Kit for nothing. But he’s a monstrous mean horse, gentlemen; any man may see that. He’s the scariest horse, too, you ever saw. He won’t do to hunt on, no how. ”

“ Gentlemen, I moreover warrant her to be a black hen, and that no washing can make her white, except whitewashing. But whether black or white, nobody can say black is the white of her eye, for she is as honest a soul as ever picked up a crumb, and if she deals in dollars, you may depend upon it they are not counterfeit. Whoever buys her will get his money’s worth if he does not give too much; and he may reckon on any reasonable number of chickens, provided he does not reckon them before they are hatched. ”

“ From that day forward it began to be remarked among the neighbours, that Bob Lee was mighty flush of money, and though he had no visible means of subsistence, spent a great deal more than he was wont. More especially it excited their wonder that his pockets always contained hard dollars, while other people had little besides paper. There is nothing equal to the prying curiosity of the inhabitants of a country village, and the buzzing and stir which an insignificant matter will arouse among a set of inquisitive gossips. ”

“ Newer, but not brighter, stars were in the ascendant, filling with their deeds the clanging trump of bear-killing fame, and, but for the quantity of bear-blankets in the neighbouring cabins, and the painful absence of his usual present of bear-hams, Mik-hoo-tah bid fair to suffer that fate most terrible in aspiring ambitionists—forgetfulness during life. ”

“ Every man went to buying land who could pay for it; and those who could not pay, bought upon credit, sure of selling it at ten times the cost within the year. Nothing was talked of but the immense advantages of the place. The riches of Dogtown were indeed immense; and how they could have been overlooked so long, was a mystery that no one could understand. The land within the limits of the town was computed at seven hundred and twenty million square feet, which, at only one cent per square foot, which is cheap enough in all conscience, would amount to seven million two hundred thousand dollars. ”

“ But swearing off from woman, and then going into a meeting-house chockfull of gals, all shining and glistening in their Sunday clothes and clean faces, is like swearing off from liquor and going into a grog-shop—it’s all smoke. ”

“ A strange hybrid, indeed, did circumstances beget here, in the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron enthusiasm, such unwilling-humour, such close-fisted generosity. This new ‘Græculus esuriens’ will make a living out of anything. He will invent new trades as well as new tools. ”

“ Bob’s house was besieged from morning till night, and the unfortunate man, under these redoubled annoyances, found he had got out of the frying-pan into the fire. He now denied the whole story, and declared that he had been only sporting with the credulity of the old Goody; but unluckily they would not believe him; people do not like to have their belief in the marvellous disturbed; they could not believe his tale of finding the money in an oak tree, but that the dollars were got from a hen’s nest, was something worth believing. ”

“ Surely you ain’t in love?”
“Love! pooh! you don’t suppose, Doc, even if I was ’tarmined to make a cussed fool of myself, that there is any gal in the swamp that could stand that hug, do you?” and catching up a huge bull-dog, who lay basking himself by the fire, he gave him such a squeeze that the animal yelled with pain, and for a few moments appeared dead. “No, Doc, it’s grief, pure sorrur, sorrur, Doc! when I looks at what I is now and what I used to be! Jes think, Doc, of the fust hunter in the swamp having his sport spilte, like bar-meat in summer without salt! ”

“ It is a favourite theory of mine, and one that I am fond of consoling myself with, for my own insignificance, that there is no man born who is not capable of attaining distinction, and no occupation that does not contain a path leading to fame. To bide our time is all that is necessary. I had expressed this view in the hearing of Mik-hoo-tah, for so was the object of this sketch called, and it seemed to chime in with his feelings exactly. ”

“ Strangers, that dog knows a bar’s way as well as a horse-jockey knows a woman’s: he always barks at the right time, bites at the exact place, and whips without getting a scratch. I never could tell whether he was made expressly to hunt bar, or whether bar was made expressly for him to hunt: any way, I believe they were ordained to go together as naturally as Squire Jones says a man and woman is, when he moralizes in marrying a couple. ”

“ Before this adventure, such things were unknown to me as possible; but, strange as it was, that bar got me used to it before I was done with him; for he got so at last, that he would leave me on a long chase quite easy. How he did it, I never could understand. That a bar runs at all is puzzling; but how this one could tire down and bust up a pack of hounds and a horse, that were used to overhauling everything they started after in no time, was past my understanding. Well, stranger, that bar finally got so sassy, that he used to help himself to a hog off my premises whenever he wanted one ”

“ The Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern States, though settled by a population speaking the same language, and enjoying the same institutions, are so distant from each other, and differ so widely in climate, soil, and productions, that they have but few features in common; while the people, from the same causes, as well as from habits, tastes, necessities, the sparseness or density of population, free soil, or slave labour, the intensity, absence, or weakness of religious enthusiasm, and many other peculiarities, are equally dissimilar. ”

“ Is it possible, Billy, a man who shoots as well as you do, never practised shooting with the double wabble? It’s the greatest take in, in the world, when you learn to drive the cross with it. Another sort for getting bets upon, to the drop sight and single wabble; and the soap-stick’s the very yarn for it. ”

“ It is no way to catch a wicked devil of a colt, in a pasture, to march right up, bridle in hand; you must sort of sidle along as if you was going past, and whistle, and pretend to be looking tother way; and so round and round, till at last you corner him up; then jump and clench him by the forelock. O! I’m not so great a fool as I might be.
But it was a long tedious business before Hannah and I could come to any sort of understanding. There was old Captain Peabody was a stump in my way. He was a man that had no regard for politeness ”

“ The process of coinage has been far more rapid and extensive in America than in Europe. That of words predominates in the Western, and that of phrases in the Eastern States. The chief peculiarity in the pronunciation of the Southern and Western people, is the giving of a broader sound than is proper to certain vowels; as whar for where, thar for there, bar for bear. ”

“ Me, John P. Pullum, drunk and fallen down! I never was so before. This world’s a turnin’ over and over. Oh, Lord! Charley Stone got me into it. What will Sally say if she hears it? Oh, Lord!”
“That thar feller,” said the Captain to himself, “is the victim of vice. I wonder ef he’s got any money?” and the Captain continued his soliloquy inaudibly.
Poor Mr. Pullum, after much tumbling about, and sundry repetitions of his fall, at length contrived to get into bed, in a room adjoining that occupied by the Captain, and only separated from it by a thin partition. ”

“ In fact, Jones once said, said he:
“ ‘Marriage, according to law, is a civil contract of divine origin; it’s common to all countries as well as Arkansaw, and people fake to it as naturally as Jim Dogget’s Bowie-knife takes to bar.’ ”
“What season of the year do your hunts take place?” inquired a gentlemanly foreigner, who, from some peculiarities of his baggage, I suspected to be an Englishman, on some hunting expedition, probably at the foot of the Rocky mountains. ”

“ THE INDEFATIGABLE BEAR-HUNTER. In my round of practice, I occasionally meet with men whose peculiarities stamp them as belonging to a class composed only of themselves. So different are they in appearance, habits, taste, from the majority of mankind, that it is impossible to classify them, and you have therefore to set them down as queer birds “of a feather,” that none resemble sufficiently to associate with. ”

“ Bob stood it out for a long while; but human endurance has its limits, and after being worried with guesses and questions till he despaired of ever being left in quiet possession of his own secret, he began to cast about for a method of allaying the public curiosity in some measure, or at least of turning it aside from himself. ”

“ Something must be had for dinner, and Bob took down the fox-skin, and set off for Deacon Grabbit’s store to sell it. As luck would have it, before he had gone a quarter of a mile, he met old Tim Twist, the Connecticut pedlar, a crony and boon companion of many years’ standing. Tim, who was glad to see his old gossip, invited him into Major Shute’s tavern to take a glass of New-England. Bob, who had never signed the temperance pledge, accepted the invitation nothing loth. They sat down over half a pint, and discussed the news. No drink tastes better than that which a man gets for nothing. ”

“ Nothing will cool a man quicker than respect and esteem, unless it is a wet blanket. But let Huldah alone, she had her eyes upon Deacon Carpenter all the time.
Well, as I was going moping along home, from Squire Jones’s, I fell in with Doctor Dingley. The Doctor saw in a minute that something was the matter, and he went to work and pumped the whole secret out of me. Then he seemed so friendly, that I up and told him all my experience with the women, from the beginning to the end. ”

“ A bar-hunt war the medsin that my systum required, a fust-class bar-hunt, the music of the dogs, the fellers a screaming, the cane poppin’, the rifles crackin’, the bar growlin’, the fight hand to hand, slap goes his paw, and a dog’s-hide hangs on one cane and his body on another, the knife glistenin’ and then goin’ plump up to the handle in his heart! ”

“ Emigrants from the border States, they engrafted on the dialects of their native places exaggerations and peculiarities of their own, until they acquired almost a new language, the most remarkable feature of which is its amplification. Everything is superlative, awful, powerful, monstrous, dreadful, almighty, and all-fired. As specimens of these extravagancies four narratives of the Adventures of the celebrated Colonel Crocket are given, of which the humour consists mainly in the marvellous. ”

“ I took my rifle to pieces, and iled it. I put caps in every pocket about my person, for fear of the lining. I then told my neighbours, that on Monday morning—naming the day—I would start that bar, and bring him home with me, or they might divide my settlement among them, the owner having disappeared. Well, stranger, on the morning previous to the great day of my hunting expedition, I went into the woods near my house, taking my gun and Bowie-knife along, just from habit, and there sitting down also from habit, what should I see, getting over my fence, but the bar! ”