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Accordingly, there were delivered to the Selectmen, and lodged in Faneuil Hall, "1778 fire-arms, 634 pistols, 978 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses." These were marked with their owners' names, and were later to be restored. As soon as this delivery of arms was effected, hundreds applied for passes to leave the town.
Because that Philanthropist had expressly declared: 'I owe it to my fellow-creatures that he should be, in the words of BENTHAM, where he is the cause of the greatest danger to the smallest number. These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness might not have hit him in a vital place. But he had to stand against a trained and well-directed fire of arms of precision too.
Of course the baron, being himself so thorough an aristocrat, had higher views for his daughter than marrying her to a "beggarly artist," and accordingly he stamped, and swore, and threatened Carl with summary punishment with all sorts of weapons, from heavy boots to blunderbusses, if ever he ventured near the premises again.
Taking, perhaps, an unfair advantage of his minute knowledge as a man-of-war's-man of cutlass-drill and of fighting in general, from pugilistic encounters to great-gun exercise, including all the intermediate performances with rapiers, swords, muskets, pistols, blunderbusses, and other weapons for "general scrimmaging," he so wrought upon the nerves of his hearers that they quivered with emotion, and when at last he drove Apollyon discomfited from the field, like chaff before the wind, there burst forth a united cheer of triumph and relief, Dan McCoy, in particular, jumping up with tumbled yellow locks and glittering eyes in a perfect yell of exultation.
"Do you men understand the use of a sword and a pistol?" said I. The men smiled at each other as though I was trying some kind of a joke on them. "They do, your honour," answered Tom Peel on their behalf. "Each one of them can sling a cutlass to the king's taste, and fire a pistol without winking, and there are now concealed in the hedge half a dozen blunderbusses in case they should be needed.
I desire no new tests no interpolations into the old creed." For his part, he was resolved never to speak again upon the slavery question in the halls of Congress. But this was after all a negative programme. Could a campaign be successfully fought without other weapons than the well-worn blunderbusses in the Democratic arsenal?
The house was fitted up, too, in so strange a manner: hammocks slung to the walls, instead of bedsteads; odd kinds of furniture, of foreign fashion; bamboo couches, Spanish chairs; pistols, cutlasses, and blunderbusses, suspended on every peg; silver crucifixes on the mantel-pieces, silver candle-sticks and porringers on the tables, contrasting oddly with the pewter and Delf ware of the original establishment.
You will think that it was good shooting in the dark, but these people used trabucos, or blunderbusses, which were filled up with all sorts of stones and scraps of metal, so that they would hit you as certainly as I have hit a pheasant on a branch. The Spaniard stood peering down through the darkness, while an occasional groan from below showed that the sergeant was still living.
"Hullo! wot have we here?" cried Big Waller, who was poking inquisitively about among the tents, to the consternation of the poor Indian children who lay huddled up in their rabbit-skin blankets, trembling from head to foot, and expecting to be scalped forthwith such of them, at least, as were old enough to expect anything. "Here's your blunderbusses, I guess, mister."
What can be more monstrous than that we, as we call ourselves, to some extent, an educated, a moral, and a Christian nation at a moment when an accident of this kind occurs, before we have made a representation to the American government, before we have heard a word from it in reply should be all up in arms, every sword leaping from its scabbard, and every man looking about for his pistols and his blunderbusses?
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