At once they both stood up, and Mr.Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, "Sit, venerable friends.

It is for us to stand in your presence." After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heard to say to somebody, "What do you suppose Squire Everett meant?
He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up when he spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down." So you will understand how few lives separate you from the time when our country was born, and the time when all our people were British subjects.
But to come back to our old meeting-house.

The windows rattled in the winter, and the cold wind came in through the cracks.
There was a stove which was rather a modern innovation; but it did little to temper the coldness of a day in midwinter.
We used to carry to church a little foot-stove with a little tin pan in it, which we filled with coal from the stove in the meeting-house, and the ladies of the family would pass it round to each other to keep their toes from freezing; but the boys did not get much benefit from it.
They had good schools in Concord, and the boys generally were good scholars and read good books.

So whenever they thought fit they could use as good language as anybody; but their speech with one another was in the racy, pithy Yankee dialect, which Lowell has made immortal in the "Biglow Papers." It was not always grammatical, but as well adapted for conveying wit and humor and shrewd sense as the Scotch of Burns.
The boys knew very well how to take the conceit or vanity out of their comrades.

In the summer days all the boys of the village used to gather at a place on the river, known as Thayer's swimming-place, about half a mile from the town pump, which was the centre from which all distances were measured in those days.