nt of the earth--a man who held directly from
God Almighty the patent of his honours? I saw that father sink
broken-hearted into the grave, the victim of legalized oppression--yes,
saw him overborne in the long contest which his high spirit and his
indomitable love of the right had incited him to maintain--overborne by
a mean, despicable scoundrel, one of the creeping things of the earth.
Heaven knows I did my utmost to assist in the struggle. In my fifteenth
year, Mr. Lindsay, when a thin, loose-jointed boy, I did the work of a
man, and strained my unknit and overtoiled sinews as if life and death
depended on the issue, till oft, in the middle of the night, I have had
to fling myself from my bed to avoid instant suffocation--an effect of
exertion so prolonged and so premature. Nor has the man exerted himself
less heartily than the boy--in the roughest, severest labours of the
field, I have never yet met a competitor. But my labours have been all
in vain--I have seen the evil bewailed by Solomon--the righteous man
falling down before the wicked." I could answer only with a sigh. "You
are in the right," he continued, after a pause, and in a more subdued
tone: "man is certainly misplaced--the present scene of things is below
the dignity of both his moral and intellectual nature. Look round
you--(we had reached the summit of a grassy eminence which rose over
the wood, and commanded a pretty extensive view of the surrounding
country)--see yonder scattered cottages, that, in the faint light, rise
dim and black amid the stubble fields--my heart warms as I look on them,
for I know how much of honest worth, and sound, generous feeling
shelters under these roof-trees. But why so much of moral excellence
united to a mere machinery for ministering to the ease and luxury of a
few of, perhaps, the least worthy of our species--creatures so spoiled
by prosperity that the claim of a common nature has no force to move
them, and who seem as miserably misplaced as the myriads whom they
oppress?"

"If I'm designed yon lordling's slave--
By nature's law designed--
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty and scorn?
Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn?"

"I would hardly know what to say in return, my friend," I rejoined, "did
not you, yourself, furnish me with the reply. You are groping on in
darkness, and it may b