“That prevented many a patient of mine from being properly nursed,” said Dr. Say. “When people are just so poor as not to afford much candlelight, such a tax as that dooms many sick to toss about in the dark, frightened at their own fancies, when a light, to show things as they are, would have composed them to sleep. That was a bad tax: the rich using few tallow candles.” “If that be bad, the others were worse;—that on cottages with less than seven windows! Lord! I shall never forget what work I used to have and to hear of about that tax. He must have been a perverse genius that thought of that tax, and deserved to be put into a cottage of two windows himself.—Do you hear, Mr. Farrer, that is over and gone; and I suppose you used to pay a tax upon Morgan that you are not asked for now?” Mr. Farrer now proved himself still able to laugh, while he told how he never paid a farthing for Morgan before the tax on female servants had been repealed. Morgan believed herself to be the fiftieth cousin of the family; and on the days when the tax-gatherer was expected, Farrer always contrived that Morgan should be seated at some employment found for her in the parlour, and called a relation of the family. Jane now understood for the first time why her father was upon occasion so strangely peremptory about the sofa cover being patched, or his shirts mended, by no one but Morgan, and nowhere but in the parlour. The repeal of these three assessed taxes, and of a fourth,—on carts and waggons,— was acknowledged to be an improvement on old management, however grievous might be the actual burdens, and the great one now in prospect. In pursuance of his plan to give Mr. Farrer none but pleasant ideas to carry to the grave, Peek proceeded to observe on the capability of the country to bear much heavier burdens than formerly. Arkwright alone had provided the means of paying a large amount of taxes, by endowing the country with the vast resources of the cotton manufacture. “And what came of it all?” muttered Mr. Farrer. “There is Arkwright in his grave, just like any other man.” “That’s very true; and just as if he had had no more than his three hundred a-year all his days. But it was a noble thing that he did,—the enabling the country to bear up in such times as we live in. For my part, I think the minister may very fairly ask for more money when such a piece of good luck has befallen us as our cotton manufacture turns out to be. I’m not so much against the war, since there is this way of paying for it.” “You forget we are in debt, Peek. ‘Duty first, and pleasure afterwards,’ I say. ‘Charity begins at home,’ say I. Pay the debt first, and then go to war, if you must.” “Some other improvements will turn up, time enough to pay the debt, I dare say. When the war is done, the minister has only to find somebody, like Arkwright, that will make a grand invention, and then he can pay off the debt at his leisure.”