The Freeman's Journal, Or, New Hampshire Gazette

The following was pick'd up in the entry of the Printing-office, which for it's novelty (if no other reasons) merits a place.

Mr. Dearborn,

If you would wish to support the character of an unprejudiced impartial Printer, you will give the following a place in your useful paper, and oblige many of your readers.

WELL done Namora. you talk sense, you preach liberty. real genuine liberty, down-right alamode liberty by G-D. I must observe however. that I was at first a good deal alarmed on discovering your design of abolishing looks E nods these dear conveyors of our secret meaning, but when I found you only meant significant ones, and that out of the abundance of your greal goodnefs and impartiality you had confined it to tories. I was immediately reconciled to it and discovered by the help of certain political microscopic glasses, that it tended to the public good.

It is indeed no less true than alarming. that these damn d tories have the impudence to meet, speak, eat and drink together as other men do : yea, they have the effrontery, in open violation of the laws both of God and man, to cast at each other as they pass, their significant looks and nods ; intolerable ! and still they go unnoticed by the committee ; amazing ! "Tis a disgrace to the state to allow of such significant looks & nods, and if the legislative body of these states have not, in their great wisdom already provided a punishment adequate to the diabolical nature of so black a crime (which hardly admits of a doubt) I think the honorable committee of this town, if they desire that the trumpet of fame should sound their praises to after ages, cannot have a fairer opportunity of immortalizing their names, that by enacting laws against such treasonable and unheard of practices ; which would at once discover their Patriotic zeal for their country, their wise and godlike penetration into the nature and cause of things, and their unerring knowledge of mankind, who carry on daily the most villainous conspiracies in no other language than looks and nods: O most shocking! what dreadful ills have not been done by nodding? I humbly think a significant look ought to be punished by a burning out of the optics, and a nod by severing off the offending head from the unoffending body; this would be going justly and regularly to work; it would be removing causes, as the surest way to prevent effects.

And now Mr. Printer, in case you or any of your readers, should be so abandoned to folly, or so full of that brutish feeling humanity, as to think the above hints towards enacting laws for the regulation of tories, are too severe, even for that infernal set of beings; or if either of you should be so unwise or unacquainted with the unbounded power of committees, as to imagine, that (though that cumbersome feeling above mentioned, could be stifled) yet these laws are in their nature chimerical, wild, and not reducible to practice and consequently that my worthy friend Namora (who to tell you the truth is no other than a double headed monkery, bred behind a spring bill counter) and myself are wicked designing devils, & foolish withal, I hereby certify & declare to all men, that tho' I may be a foolish devil, yet, I am neither a wicked or designing one. and that these two last epithets with all the detestable ideas attending them are only applied to my double headed friend; this being only a kind of explanatory supplement to his piece. I am
What you will.