stiff commercial one, that had
generally kept demure, yet grasping, and practised the conservatism he
also boasted of, but had departed from: he was the outlaw of the house,
yet elevating its tenets into an aggressive shibboleth, the more so that
he prospered by anti-progress.

He was a backer of domestic slave-dealers, and put his money into forms
of gain men hesitated at; not only at the curbstone, for usury, but
behind pawnbrokers and sporting men, in lottery companies and
liquor-houses, and, it was said, in the open slave-trade, too, clippers
for which occasionally stole out of the Chesapeake on affected trading
errands to the East Indies, and came home with nothing but West India
fruits.

He strove to maintain his credit by ostentatious abhorrence of novelties
and heterodoxies, and of all liberal agitations, and had the sublime
hardihood to carry his Bible into every sink of shame, as if it was the
natural baggage of a gentleman, and expected with him; and he would
rebuke "blasphemy" while bidding at the slave auction or sitting in a
bar-room full of kidnappers, among many of whom he passed for a
religious standard.

No portion of that Bible gave him any delight or occupation, however,
except the Old Testament, with its thoroughgoing codes of servitude,
concubinage, and an-eye-for-an-eye. He knew the Jewish laws better than
the Scribes and Pharisees in the time of Herod and John, and had
persuaded himself that the mental endorsement and, wherever possible,
the practice of these, constituted a firm believer. Revenge,
intolerance, formality, and self-sleekness had become so much his theory
that he did not know himself whether he was capable of doing evil
provided he wanted anything.

Not particularly courageous, he was so destitute of sensibility that he
felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white
inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather
preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted
no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and
so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious
social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.

"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice,
like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you
may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"

"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide