That lease was granted, on terms highly favourable to the tenant, sixty years since, old Newcome, luckily for himself and his posterity, having named this long-lived son as one of his three lives. Now Seneky, God bless him! is known to lease a few of the lots that have fallen to his share of the property for more money than is required to meet all your rent on the whole. Such, in effect, has been the fact with that mill-lot for the last thirty years, or even longer; and the circumstance of the great length of time so excellent a bargain has existed, is used as an argument why the Newcomes ought to have a deed of the property for a nominal price; or, indeed, for no price at all, if the tenants could have their wishes." "I am afraid there is nothing unnatural in thus perverting principles; half mankind appear to me really to get a great many of their notions _dessus dessous_." "Half is a small proportion; as you will find, my boy, when you grow older. But was it not an impudent proposal of Seneca, when he wished you and me to join the corps of 'Injins?'" "What answer did you make? Though I suppose it would hardly do for us to go disguised and armed, now that the law makes it a felony, even while our motive, at the bottom, might be to aid the law." "Catch me at that act of folly! Why, Hugh, could they prove such a crime on either of _us_, or any one connected with an old landed family, we should be the certain victims. No governor would dare pardon _us_. No, no; clemency is a word reserved for the obvious and confirmed rogues." "We might get a little favour on the score of belonging to a very powerful body of offenders." "True; I forgot that circumstance. The more numerous the crimes and the criminals, the greater the probability of impunity; and this, too, not on the general principle that power cannot be resisted, but on the particular principle that a thousand or two votes are of vast importance, where three thousand can turn an election. God only knows where this thing is to end!" We now approached one of the humbler taverns of the place, where it was necessary for those of our apparent pretensions to seek lodgings, and the discourse was dropped. It was several weeks too early in the season for the Springs to be frequented, and we found only a few of those in the place who drank the waters because they really required them. My uncle had been an old stager at Saratoga--a beau of the "purest water," as he laughingly described himself--and he was enabled to explain all that it was necessary for me to know. An American watering-place, however, is so very much inferior to most of those in Europe, as to furnish very little, in their best moments, beyond the human beings they contain, to attract the attention of the traveller.