"My friend, I know what your desire is. You want to rob me of my one delight. But I feel myself safe for a long while yet. I rely upon many obstacles. In the first place, will your own discretion and judgment bear you out in wishing, even if you had my consent, to connect yourself with a race of such dark fortunes and sad calamities, and crimes as well--for crimes they are? And perhaps there are more before us. I have told you my tale, to show you this. I believe not of course in any heathen conceptions--Até, Nemesis, Ananché, or what not? But who can deny that there is an inheritance of evil quite beyond our power to explain?" "That may be so. But my one prayer is to be allowed to risk such penalty." "You speak like an Englishman," he answered, looking at me very gravely; "other men equally brave would decline, through the force of superstition. But I have only begun my objections yet. For instance, what would your own friends have to say about this question? You have not mentioned it yet, I suppose, as nothing was likely to come of it. But without that, you must know pretty nearly how your friends would take it." I answered in so many words that they left me to follow my own judgment now; that while things continued as they were, it would be wrong of me to forsake them, as they could never get on without me; but that a change for the better might be expected now with all confidence, for England was sick of that farce so ridiculously called "free-trade," and then the land might feed her sons again, instead of giving them nothing but a weedy grave. "It is the standing joke of Europe," he replied; "there is nothing to compare with it in history. Your benevolence is of the highest order, because so purely unconscious. But it will require another generation to restore your sanity, unless you have a war that blocks your supplies; and then how simple! That man who can fast for forty days may challenge the nation, when war is declared, and outlive them all, though they eat all they can get. But let me not interrupt you." What is the loaf compared to love? The dealers and the middlemen have the chief pull of the former. Turn me into a Radical, if the labourer gets an ounce the more for his fourpence, than he often did of old, when his right hand stood him in good stead, and his Saturday night was certain. But a foreigner is allowed to show the common-sense, which an Englishman is hooted down for hinting. "We shall never be as we were," I said, "we shall always be poor, Sûr Imar. And I am only a younger son. If it is your duty to repel me for that reason, I have nothing more to say."