The Clockmaker

Excerpt

The name “Sam Slick” has passed into popular use as standing for a
somewhat conventional Yankee, in whom sharpness and verdancy are
combined in curious proportions; but the book which gave rise to
the name has long been out of print.  It is now revived, under the
impression that the reading public will have an interest in seeing
a work which, more probably than any other one book, served to fix
the prevailing idea of the Yankee character.  However true or false
the impression it created, the qualities which rendered it popular
a generation ago remain, in a shrewdness of observation, a fund of
anecdote and racy adventure, a quaintness of expression, and keen
mother wit.  In no other work of literature is there preserved so
large a collection of idiomatic phrases, words, and similes,—­whole
stories in themselves and pictures of society at the time, which grow
more interesting, the more historic they become.