“Now, remember, my dear young lady, you are speaking to the most suspectful, unimpulsive, and ungenerously disposed of all natures, an old lawyer, who has witnessed so many events in life he would have once pronounced impossible,--ay, just as roundly as you said the word yourself,--and seen people and things under aspects so totally the reverse of what he first knew them, that he has taught himself to believe that change is the law, and not permanence, in this life, and that you and I, and all of us, ought ever to look forward to anything, everything, but the condition in which at present we find ourselves. Now, I don't want to discourage you with the noble career you have opened for yourself here. I am far more likely to be fascinated--I was going to say fall in love--with you for it, than to try and turn your thoughts elsewhere; but as to these people themselves, the experiment comes too late.” “Is it ever too late to repair a wrong, to assist destitution, relieve misery, and console misfortune?” broke in Mary, eagerly. “It is too late to try the feudal system in the year of our Lord 1829, Miss Martin. We live in an age where everything is to be redressed by a Parliament. The old social compact between proprietor and peasant is repealed, and all must be done by 'the House.' Now, if your grandfather had pursued the path that you are doing to-day, this crisis might never have arrived; but he did not, young lady. He lived like a real gentleman; he hunted, and drank, and feasted, and rack-rented, and horsewhipped all around him; and what with duelling of a morning and drinking over-night, taught the people a code of morals that has assumed all the compactness of a system. Ay, I say it with grief, this is a land corrupted from the top, and every vice of its gentry has but filtered down to its populace! What was that I heard?--was it not a shot?” cried he, reining in his horse to listen. “I thought so, too; but it might be a blast, for we are not far from the quarries.” “And do you preserve the game, Miss Martin? are you sworn foe to the poacher?” “I do so; but in reality more for the sake of the people than the partridges. Your lounging country fellow, with a rusty gun and a starved lurcher, is but an embryo highwayman.”