So I stumbled a bit, and succeeded in recalling, as objects which do not improve with age, mushrooms, women, and chickens, and he was obliged to agree with me, which nearly killed him.

Then I said that although America is so fresh and blooming that people persist in calling it young, it is much older than it appears to the superficial eye.

There is no real propriety in dating us as a nation from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, I said, nor even from the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620; nor, for that matter, from Columbus's discovery in 1492.

It's my opinion, I asserted, that some of us had been there thousands of years before, but nobody had had the sense to discover us.

We couldn't discover ourselves,--though if we could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had to do something desperate!" "That theory must have been very convincing to the philosophic Scots mind," I interjected.
"It was; even Mr.Macdonald thought it ingenious.