In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63, that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People, Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists,&c.&c., well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning, at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the day. Mark, we saynotorieties, for that is the word.

From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their parrot-mouthings of them!

Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean, rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.

Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared, in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”

Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or rathergolden locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of the old Italian painters.

Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised this soulless and meddlesomenon-r