contracted in your behalf and for your
benefit. You are not bound to marry the girl whose affections have been
your own for years if you can do better in another quarter, and she
has nothing in your handwriting to establish a contract. You are not
bound,--good swimmer though you be,--to rescue a man from drowning, lest
he should clutch too eagerly and peril your safety. You are not bound to
risk the chance of a typhus by visiting a poor friend on his sick-bed.
You are not bound to aid charities you but half approve,--to assist
people who have been improvident,--to associate with many who are
uninteresting to you. But why go on with this expurgatorial catalogue?
It is quite clear the only things "one _is_ bound" to do are those the
world will enforce at his hands; and let our selfishness be ever so
inveterate, and ever so crafty, the majority will beat us, and the Ayes
have it at last!

Now, few men had a longer list of the things they were "not bound to
do" than Annesley Beecher; in reality, if the balance were to be struck
between them and those he acknowledged to be obligatory, it would have
been like Falstaff's sack to the miserable morsel of bread. Men of
his stamp fancy themselves very wise in their generation. They are not
easy-natured, open, trustful, and free-handed, like that Pharisee! Take
my word for it, the system works not so well as it looks, and they
pass their existence in a narrow prison-ward of their own selfish
instincts,--their fears their fetters, their cowardly natures heavy as
any chains!

Beecher reasoned somewhat in this wise. Grog was "not bound" to destroy
the acceptances. He might have held them in terrorism over him for a
long life, and used them, at last, if occasion served. At all events,
they were valuable securities, which it was pure and wanton waste to
burn. Still, the act being done, Beecher was "bound" in the heaviest
recognizances to his own heart to profit by the motion; and the great
question with him was, what was the best and shortest road to that
desirable object? Supposing Lackington all right,--no disputed claim
to the title, no litigation of the estate,--Beecher's best course had
possibly been to slip his cable, make all sail, and part company with
Davis forever. One grave difficulty, however, opposed itself to this
scheme. How was it possible for any man walking the earth to get out of
reach of Grog Davis? Had there been a planet allotted for the special
use of peers,--we