If you had a written this book fust, the English would have said your gun was no good; it wouldn't have been like the rifles they had seen.

Lord, I could tell you stories about the English, that would make even them cryin' devils the Mississippi crocodiles laugh, if they was to hear 'em." "Pardon me, Mr.Slick," I said, "this is not the temper with which you should visit England." "What is the temper," he replied with much warmth, "that they visit us in?
Cuss 'em! Look at Dickens; was there ever a man made so much of, except La Fayette?
And who was Dickens?
Not a Frenchman that is a friend to us, not a native that has a claim on us; not a colonist, who, though English by name is still an American by birth, six of one and half a dozen of t'other, and therefore a kind of half-breed brother.

No! he was a cussed Britisher; and what is wus, a British author; and yet, because he was a man of genius, because genius has the 'tarnal globe for its theme, and the world for its home, and mankind for its readers, and bean't a citizen of this state or that state, but a native of the univarse, why we welcomed him, and feasted him, and leveed him, and escorted him, and cheered him, and honoured him, did he honour us?
What did he say of us when he returned?
Read his book.
"No, don't read his book, for it tante worth readin'.

Has he said one word of all that reception in his book?
that book that will be read, translated, and read agin all over Europe--has he said one word of that reception?
Answer me that, will you?
Darned the word, his memory was bad; he lost it over the tafrail when he was sea-sick.

But his notebook was safe under lock and key, and the pigs in New York, and the chap the rats eat in jail, and the rough man from Kentucky, and the entire raft of galls emprisoned in one night, and the spittin' boxes and all that stuff, warn't trusted to memory, it was noted down, and printed.
"But it tante no matter.