On the whole, I felt very melancholy and lugubrious, and began to have my thoughts of leaving Zachariah Longstraw's body at the first convenient opportunity. The great difficulty was, however, to find a tenement in which I might promise myself content, the disappointment I had experienced in my present adventure having filled me with doubts as to the reality of any human happiness. "At least," said I to myself "I will henceforth look before I leap. I will cast mine eyes about me, I will gird up my loins and look abroad into the human family, and peradventure I shall find some man whose body is worth reanimating. Yea, verily, I will next time be certain I am not putting my soul, as the pickpocket did his hand, into a sack of fish-hooks." With this resolution on my mind I walked towards my house, and was just about to pass the door, when an adventure befell me which knocked the aforesaid resolution entirely on the head. But before I relate it my conscience impels me to make one remark, which I beg the reader, if he be a man of fortune and blood, to peruse, without excusing himself on the score of its dulness. 14. CHAPTER XIV. A REMARK, IN WHICH THE AUTHOR APPEARS AS A POLITICIAN, AND ABUSES BOTH PARTIES. There are other persons besides Zachariah the philanthropist, who have experienced the ingratitude of the poor; and, truth to say, if we can believe the accounts of those who profess to have the best means of judging, there is more of it among that class of beings in the United States than in any other Christian land. If it be so, let not the reader wonder at its existence. It springs, like a thousand other evils of a worse, because of a political complexion, from that constitution of society which, notwithstanding its being in opposition to all the interests of the land and the character of our institutions, is founded in, and perpetuated by, the folly of the richer classes. It lies, not in the _natural_ enmity supposed to exist between the rich and the poor, but in the unnatural hatred provoked in the bosoms of the one by the offensive pride and arrogance of the other. The poor man in America feels himself, in a political view, as he really is, the equal of the millionaire; but this very consciousness of equality adds double bitterness to the sense of actual inferiority, which the richer and more fortunate usually do their best, as far as manners and deportment are concerned, to keep alive. Why should the folly of a feudal aristocracy prevail under the shadow of a purely democratic government? It is to the stupid pride, the insensate effort at pomp and ostentation, the unconcealed contempt of labour, the determination, manifested in a thousand ways, and always as unfeelingly as absurdly, to keep the "base mechanical" aware of the gulf between him and his betters--in a word, to the puerile vanity and stolid pride of the genteel and refined, that we owe the exasperation of those classes in