mportance of the present time. Their father looked upon
them with mixed feelings of tender pride in them, and regret for his own
lost youth. The strong and busy years on which they were entering had
been all spent by him in acquiring one habit of mind, to which his
temperament and his training alike conduced--a habit of endurance. It
was at this time that he had acquired the power of reading enough to
seek for books; and the books that he had got hold of were Epictetus,
and some fragments of Fenelon. With all the force of youth, he had been
by turns the stoic and the quietist; and, while busied in submitting
himself to the pressure of the present, he had turned from the past, and
scarcely dreamed of the future. If his imagination glanced back to the
court of his royal grandfather, held under the palm shades, or pursuing
the lion-hunt amidst the jungles of Africa, he had hastily withdrawn his
mind's eye from scenes which might create impatience of his lot; and if
he ever wondered whether a long succession of ignorant and sensual
blacks were to be driven into the field by the whip every day in Saint
Domingo, for evermore, he had cut short the speculation as inconsistent
with his stoical habit of endurance, and his Christian principle of
trust. It was not till his youth was past that he had learned anything
of the revolutions of the world--too late to bring them into his
speculations and his hopes. He had read, from year to year, of the
conquests of Alexander and of Caesar; he had studied the wars of France,
and drawn the plans of campaigns in the sand before his door till he
knew them by heart; but it had not occurred to him, that while empires
were overthrown in Asia, and Europe was traversed by powers which gave
and took its territories, as he saw the negroes barter their cocoa-nuts
and plantains on Saturday nights--while such things had happened in
another hemisphere, it had not occurred to him that change would ever
happen in Saint Domingo. He had heard of earthquakes taking place at
intervals of hundreds of years, and he knew that the times of the
hurricane were not calculable; but, patient and still as was his own
existence, he had never thought whether there might not be a convulsion
of human affections, a whirlwind of human passion, preparing under the
grim order of society in the colony. If a master died, his heir
succeeded him; if the "force" of any plantation was by any conjuncture
of circumstances dispe