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stones, to mend the road.
Friend Hopper suggested to the driver that he had better ask them to remove a very large stone, which lay directly in the way and seemed dangerous.
‘It will be of no use if I do,’ replied the driver.
‘They'll only curse me, and tell me to go round the old road, over the hill; for the fact is, this road is not fairly opened to the public yet.’
Friend Hopper jumped out, and asked if they would turn that big stone aside.
‘And sure ye've no business here at all,’ they replied.
‘Ye may jist go round by the ould road.’
‘Och!’
said Friend Hopper, ‘and is this the way I'm trated by my coontryman?
I'm from Ireland meself; and sure I did'nt expect to be trated so by my coontrymen in a strange coontry.’
‘And are ye from ould Ireland?’
inquired they.
‘Indade I am,’ he replied.
‘And what part may ye be from?’
said they.
‘From Mount Mellick, Queen's County,’ rejoined he; and he began to talk familiarly about the priest and the doctor there, till he got the laborers into a real good humor, and they removed the stone with the utmost alacrity.
The passengers in the stage listened to this conversation, and supposed that he was in reality an Irish Quaker.
When he returned to them and explained the joke, they had a hearty laugh over his powers of mimicry.
His tricks with children were innumerable.
They
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
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