Mildly and placidly he sat with his hands resting on his knees, while Mr. Zebedee and Mrs. Scudder compared notes respecting the relative prospects of corn, flax, and buckwheat, and thence passed to the doings of Congress and the last proclamation of General Washington, pausing once in a while, if, peradventure, the Doctor might take up the conversation. Still he sat dreamily eyeing the flies as they fizzed down the panes of the half-open window. "I think," said Mr. Zebedee, "the prospects of the Federal party were never brighter." The Doctor was a stanch Federalist, and generally warmed to this allurement; but it did not serve this time. Suddenly drawing himself up, a light came into his blue eyes, and he said to Mr. Marvyn,-- "I'm thinking, Deacon, if it is wrong to keep back the wages of a servant till after the going down of the sun, what those are to do who keep them back all their lives." There was a way the Doctor had of hearing and seeing when he looked as if his soul were afar off, and bringing suddenly into present conversation some fragment of the past on which he had been leisurely hammering in the quiet chambers of his brain, which was sometimes quite startling. This allusion to a passage of Scripture which Mr. Marvyn was reading when he came in, and which nobody supposed he had attended to, startled Mrs. Scudder, who thought, mentally, "Now for it!" and laid down her knitting-work, and eyed her cousin anxiously. Mrs. Marvyn and Mary, who had glided in and joined the circle, looked interested; and a slight flush rose and overspread the thin cheeks of Mr. Marvyn, and his blue eyes deepened a moment with a thoughtful shadow, as he looked inquiringly at the Doctor, who proceeded:-- "My mind labors with this subject of the enslaving of the Africans, Mr. Marvyn. We have just been declaring to the world that all men are born with an inalienable right to liberty. We have fought for it, and the Lord of Hosts has been with us; and can we stand before Him with our foot upon our brother's neck?" A generous, upright nature is always more sensitive to blame than another,--sensitive in proportion to the amount of its reverence for good,--and Mr. Marvyn's face flushed, his eye kindled, and his compressed respiration showed how deeply the subject moved him. Mrs. Marvyn's eyes turned on him an anxious look of inquiry. He answered, however, calmly:-- "Doctor, I have thought of the subject, myself. Mrs. Marvyn has lately been reading a pamphlet of Mr. Thomas Clarkson's on the slave-trade, and she was saying to me only last night, that she did not see but the argument extended equally to holding slaves. One thing, I confess, stumbles me:--Was there not an express permission given to Israel to buy and hold slaves of old?"