manner, his over-acted reserve,
had offended Mary to the quick; and thus, both mutually retreated in
misconception and distrust. The game of love is the same, whether the
players be clad in velvet or in hodden grey. Beneath the gilded ceilings
of a palace, or the lowly rafters of a cabin, there are the same hopes
and fears, the same jealousies, and distrusts, and despondings; the
wiles and stratagems are all alike; for, after all, the stake is human
happiness, whether he who risks it be a peer or a peasant! While Owen
vacillated between hope and fear, now, resolving to hazard an avowal
of his love and take his stand on the result, now, deeming it better to
trust to time and longer intimacy, other events were happening around,
which could not fail to interest him deeply. The new agent had commenced
his campaign with an activity before unknown. Arrears of rent were
demanded to be peremptorily paid up; leases, whose exact conditions had
not been fulfilled, were declared void; tenants occupying sub-let
land were noticed to quit; and all the threatening signs of that rigid
management displayed, by which an estate is assumed to be "admirably
regulated," and the agent's duty most creditably discharged.

Many of the arrears were concessions made by the landlord in seasons of
hardship and distress, but were unrecorded as such in the rent-roll or
the tenant's receipt. There had been no intention of ever redemanding
them; and both parties had lost sight of the transaction until the sharp
glance of a "new agent" discovered their existence. So of the leases:
covenants to build, or plant, or drain, were inserted rather as
contingencies, which prosperity might empower, than as actual conditions
essential to be fulfilled; and as for sub-letting, it was simply the act
by which a son or a daughter was portioned in the world, and enabled to
commence the work of self-maintenance.

This slovenly system inflicted many evils. The demand of an extravagant
rent rendered an abatement not a boon, but an act of imperative
necessity; and while the overhanging debt supplied the landlord with a
means of tyranny, it deprived the tenant of all desire to improve his
condition. "Why should I labour," said he, "when the benefit never can
be mine?" The landlord then declaimed against ingratitude, at the time
that the peasant spoke against oppression. Could they both be right? The
impossibility of ever becoming independent soon suggested that dogged
indif