and tone addressed to each of
us! Hal hung down his head, and followed to the lower room. A clergyman
begged a blessing on the meal. He touched with not a little art and
eloquence upon our arrival at home, upon our safe passage across the
stormy waters, upon the love and forgiveness which awaited us in the
mansions of the Heavenly Parent when the storms of life were over.

Here was a new clergyman, quite unlike some whom I remembered about us
in earlier days, and I praised him, but Madam Esmond shook her head. She
was afraid his principles were very dangerous: she was afraid others had
adopted those dangerous principles. Had I not seen the paper signed by
the burgesses and merchants at Williamsburg the year before--the Lees,
Randolphs, Bassets, Washingtons, and the like, and oh, my dear, that
I should have to say it, our name, that is, your brother's (by what
influence I do not like to say), and this unhappy Mr. Belman's who
begged a blessing last night?

If there had been quarrels in our little colonial society when I left
home, what were these to the feuds I found raging on my return? We had
sent the Stamp Act to America, and been forced to repeal it. Then we
must try a new set of duties on glass, paper, and what not, and repeal
that Act too, with the exception of a duty on tea. From Boston to
Charleston the tea was confiscated. Even my mother, loyal as she was,
gave up her favourite drink; and my poor wife would have had to forgo
hers, but we had brought a quantity for our private drinking on board
ship, which had paid four times as much duty at home. Not that I for my
part would have hesitated about paying duty. The home Government must
have some means of revenue, or its pretensions to authority were idle.
They say the colonies were tried and tyrannised over; I say the home
Government was tried and tyrannised over. ('Tis but an affair of
argument and history, now; we tried the question, and were beat; and
the matter is settled as completely as the conquest of Britain by the
Normans.) And all along, from conviction I trust, I own to have
taken the British side of the quarrel. In that brief and unfortunate
experience of war which I had had in my early life, the universal cry of
the army and well-affected persons was, that Mr. Braddock's expedition
had failed, and defeat and disaster had fallen upon us in consequence
of the remissness, the selfishness, and the rapacity of many of the very
people for whose defence aga