The master was wholly respectable in his life and character; endowed with good sense; well enough off in the world, able to hire service, if he needed, and to pay for it: his temper not bad, though sometimes irritable;--he could be provoked as others can. He had strong passions, and sometimes in the course of his life they had got the better of him, and had led him to conduct which, in the coolness of his mind, he bitterly repented. Circumstances might have made a bad man of him. The instructions which he received in his childhood, the example of his parents, the respectable neighborhood in which he resided, the church which he attended, all had a favorable influence upon him. So he became a man of principle. He had not, indeed, the highest principles; he was no hero; he was not disposed to make himself a martyr. His religion was no other than the common religion of the church to which he was attached, and it demanded no peculiar sacrifice of him. He was a member of one of the leading political parties, and did his full duty in maintaining its cause. He called himself a patriot, however, not a partizan; and talked ever of his country, as the highest exemplification of the great principles of liberty, and considered the success of our institutions as the hope of humanity. Yet he loved his country,--not his race. He was not without charity to the poor; and was not unwilling to see them, individually, rising above destitution. Yet he did not like to associate with men lower in the social scale than himself; but had an ambition that impelled him to court the society of those whose station and influence were superior to his own. Nor did he care for, or believe in, any suggestions or plans, the object of which was the elevation of the poor as a class, and the levelling upwards of the human race. He thought that as a divine authority has declared to us, “ye have the poor with you always,” it was ordained that we should always have them,--that they were an exceedingly useful class, as a foundation in society, that the prosperous men of the world could not do without them, and that it was not best to give them too much hope of rising. Perhaps you will say I have given you no very definite description of him. You will think, perhaps, were I called to write of him again, I might, at once, better make use of the words of the poet, The annals of the human race, Their ruins, since the world began, Of him afford no other trace Than this,--THERE LIVED A MAN!