"You have no right, sir, in a free country," returned the caustic Jack Dunning, "to prefer one estate to another, more especially when other people want it. Your lands are leased to honest, hard-working tenants, who can eat their dinners without silver forks, and whose ancestors----" "Stop!" I cried, laughing; "I bar all ancestry. No man has a right to ancestry in a free country, you'll remember!" "That means landlord-ancestry; as for tenant-ancestry, one can have a pedigree as long as the Maison de Levis. No, sir; every tenant you have has every right to demand that his sentiment of family feeling should be respected. His father planted that orchard, and he loves the apples better than any other apples in the world----" "And my father procured the grafts, and made him a present of them." "His grandfather cleared that field, and converted its ashes into pots and pearls----" "And _my_ grandfather received that year ten shillings of rent, for land off which his received two hundred and fifty dollars for his ashes." "His great-grandfather, honest and excellent man--nay, super-honest and confiding creature--first 'took up' the land when a wilderness, and with his own hands felled the timber, and sowed the wheat." "And got his pay twenty-fold for it all, or he would not have been fool enough to do it. I had a great-grandfather, too; and I hope it will not be considered aristocratic if I venture to hint as much. He--a dishonest, pestilent knave, no doubt--leased that very lot for six years without any rent at all, in order that the 'poor, confiding creature' might make himself comfortable, before he commenced paying his sixpence or shilling an acre rent for the remainder of three lives, with a moral certainty of getting a renewal on the most liberal terms known to a new country; and who knew, the whole time, he could buy land in fee, within ten miles of his door, but who thought _this_ a better bargain than _that_." "Enough of this folly," cried uncle Ro, joining in the laugh; "we all know that, in our excellent America, he who has the highest claims to anything, must affect to have the least, to stifle the monster envy; and, being of one mind as to principles, let us come to facts. What of the girls, Jack, and of my honoured mother?" "She, noble, heroic woman! she is at Ravensnest at this moment; and, as the girls would not permit her to go alone, they are all with her." "And did you, Jack Dunning, suffer them to go unattended into a part of the country that is in open rebellion?" demanded my uncle, reproachfully. "Come, come! Hodge Littlepage, this is very sublime as a theory, but not so clear when reduced to practice. I did not go with Mrs. Littlepage and her young fry, for the good and substantial reason that I did not wish to be 'tarred and feathered.'" "So you leave them to run the risk of being 'tarred and feathered' in your stead?"