«
    »Hear, hear!« cried the colonel, with great complacency. »There are flowery
components, sir, in the language of my friend?«
    »Very much so, indeed,« said Martin.
    »There is to-day's Rowdy, sir,« observed the colonel, handing him a paper.
»You'll find Jefferson Brick at his usual post in the van of human civilisation
and moral purity.«
    The colonel was by this time seated on the table again. Mr. Brick also took
up a position on that same piece of furniture; and they fell to drinking pretty
hard. They often looked at Martin as he read the paper, and then at each other.
When he laid it down, which was not until they had finished a second bottle, the
colonel asked him what he thought of it.
    »Why, it's horribly personal,« said Martin.
    The colonel seemed much flattered by this remark; and said he hoped it was.
    »We are independent here, sir,« said Mr. Jefferson Brick. »We do as we
like.«
    »If I may judge from this specimen,« returned Martin, »there must be a few
thousands here, rather the reverse of independent, who do as they don't like.«
    »Well! They yield to the mighty mind of the Popular Instructor, sir,« said
the colonel. »They rile up, sometimes; but in general we have a hold upon our
citizens, both in public and in private life, which is as much one of the
ennobling institutions of our happy country as -«
    »As nigger slavery itself,« suggested Mr. Brick.
    »En-tirely so,« remarked the colonel.
    »Pray,« said Martin, after some hesitation, »may I venture to ask, with
reference to a case I observe in this paper of yours, whether the Popular
Instructor often deals in - I am at a loss to express it without giving you
offence - in forgery? In forged letters, for instance,« he pursued, for the
colonel was perfectly calm and quite at his ease, »solemnly purporting to have
been written at recent periods by living men?«
    »Well, sir!« replied the colonel. »It does, now and then.«
    »And the popular instructed; what do they do?« asked Martin.
    »Buy 'em:« said the colonel.
    Mr. Jefferson Brick expectorated and laughed; the former copiously, the
latter approvingly.
    »Buy 'em by hundreds
