ist.
Framed on the walls of his parlours were letters from his Prince,
thanking him for specimen seeds and worthy counsel: veritable autograph
letters of the highest value. The Prince had steamed up the salt river,
upon which the Sutton harvests were mirrored, and landed on a spot
marked in honour of the event by a broad grey stone; and from that
day Jonathan Eccles stood on a pinnacle of pride, enabling him to see
horizons of despondency hitherto unknown to him. For he had a son, and
the son was a riotous devil, a most wild young fellow, who had no
taste for a farmer's life, and openly declared his determination not to
perpetuate the Sutton farm in the hands of the Eccleses, by running off
one day and entering the ranks of the British army.

Those framed letters became melancholy objects for contemplation,
when Jonathan thought that no posterity of his would point them out
gloryingly in emulation. Man's aim is to culminate; but it is the
saddest thing in the world to feel that we have accomplished it. Mr.
Eccles shrugged with all the philosophy he could summon, and transferred
his private disappointment to his country, whose agricultural day was,
he said, doomed. "We shall be beaten by those Yankees." He gave Old
England twenty years of continued pre-eminence (due to the impetus of
the present generation of Englishmen), and then, said he, the Yankees
will flood the market. No more green pastures in Great Britain; no
pretty clean-footed animals; no yellow harvests; but huge chimney pots
everywhere; black earth under black vapour, and smoke-begrimed faces.
In twenty years' time, sooty England was to be a gigantic manufactory,
until the Yankees beat us out of that field as well; beyond which
Jonathan Eccles did not care to spread any distinct border of prophecy;
merely thanking the Lord that he should then be under grass. The decay
of our glory was to be edged with blood; Jonathan admitted that there
would be stuff in the fallen race to deliver a sturdy fight before they
went to their doom.

For this prodigious curse, England had to thank young Robert, the
erratic son of Jonathan.

It was now two years since Robert had inherited a small legacy of money
from an aunt, and spent it in waste, as the farmer bitterly supposed.
He was looking at some immense seed-melons in his garden, lying about in
morning sunshine--a new feed for sheep, of his own invention,--when the
call of the wanderer saluted his ears, and he beheld his