of natural affection to run rather in the descending than in the ascending line; a wisdom to which this proverb, though with a certain exaggeration of the facts, bears witness. [Sidenote: French proverb.] How exquisitely delicate is the touch of this French proverb: _It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one’s horse by the bridle_.[110] How fine and subtle an insight into the inner workings of the human heart is here; how many cheap humilities are here set at their true worth. It _is_ easy to stoop from state, when that state may be resumed at will; easy for one to part with luxuries and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so long as it may please himself. No reason indeed is to be found in this comparative easiness for the not ‘going afoot;’ on the contrary, it may be to him a most profitable exercise; but every reason for not esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it on a level with the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at whatever moment he may please. There is, and always must be, some rough work to be done in the world; work which, though rough, is not therefore in the least ignoble; and the schemes, so daintily conceived, of a luxurious society, which repose on a tacit assumption that nobody shall have to do this work, are touched with a fine irony in this Arabic proverb: _If I am master, and thou art master, who shall drive the asses?_[111] Again, how clever is the satire of the following Haytian proverb, which, however, I must introduce with a little preliminary explanation. It was one current among the slave population of St. Domingo, and with it they ridiculed the ambition and pretension of the mulatto race immediately above them. These, in imitation of the French planters, must have their duels too—duels, however, which had nothing earnest or serious about them, invariably ending in a reconciliation and a feast, the kids which furnished the latter being in fact the only sufferers, their blood that which alone was shed. All this the proverb uttered: _Mulattoes fight, kids die_.[112] [Sidenote: Fuller’s use of proverbs.]