THE GRANDEUR OF ANCESTRY.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 332, 23 September 1879, Page 3

THE GRANDEUR OF ANCESTRY.

In a letter to the Burlington Hawkeye Mr Burdette, the humorist, says :— . Speaking of relics, just before we reached; Portsmouth, a,man entered into conversation with me. He said— " You are from the Wept." , - I murmured something' about the vast illimitable, &c, and the man said— " Yours is a new country—a new country—a n-e-w country." Yes, I told him, it was new, but it was ihe only one we had, and accordingly we wore it on Sundays and week days alike, worked and went to parties in it, and it would soon look a.thousand years old. " We've," the man said, " come down from the venerable mists of antiquity. It is a glorious thought." Yes, I said, but it wasn't pleasant. I was in Boston four days, and it eastwinded and rained three of them. It was misty enough, but it spoiled the prospect. "My ancestors," he said, " came over in the Mayflower. But yours- ?" And he looked at me with a rising inflection. I tried to slay him with a look of silent scorn, but she riiissed fire. " Your ancestors, I take it," said the man, " did not come over in the Mayflower ?" And then I turned upon him. " Sir," I remarked, " this Mayflower, I take it, was a sailing ship." " She was," he said, vainly endeavoring to stifle his emotion, " she was a sailing ship." "Then," I said haughtily, "most assuredly my ancestors did not come over in the Mayflower. It has never been the misfortune of my family to be compelled to take passage on any ship of the mercantile marine. My ■ ancestors came oyer in a Cunard steariier, first cabin, no steerage passengers carried, only ten days from Liverpool, and the minute they landed in New York they went straight up to Mrs Astor's tavern, and took front rooms oh the parlor floor." I thought i;h.d. crushed that/'-man.-/but may I be blessed if he didn't look as though he pitied me.