Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[352] the second so completely as to leave him little to say. It is universally the case, I believe, that toward the end of the campaign every good point made by any speaker, every telling anecdote, every neat repartee, is so quoted from one to another that the speeches grow more and more identical. One gets acquainted, too, with a variety of prejudices, and gains insight into many local peculiarities and even accents. I remember that once, when I was speaking on the same platform with an able young Irish lawyer, he was making an attack on the present Senator Lodge, and said contemptuously, “Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge of Nahant” --and he paused for a response which did not adequately follow. Then he repeated more emphatically, “Of Nahant! He calls it in that way, but common people say Nahant!” Then the audience took the point, and, being largely Irish, responded enthusiastically. Now, Mr. Lodge had only pronounced the name of his place of residence as he had done from the cradle, as his parents had said it before him, and as all good Bostonians had habitually pronounced it, with the broad sound that is universal among Englishmen, except-as Mr. Thomas Hardy has lately assured me — in the Wessex region; while this sarcastic young political critic, on the other hand, representing