And so it was seen in the deportment of Kenric the serf, and of the slave girl Edith, even in these first days of their newly-acquired freedom. Self-respect they had never lost altogether; and their increased sense of it was shown in the increased gravity and calmness and becomingness of their deportment. Slaves may be merry, or they may be sullen. But they can not be thoughtful, or calm, or careworn. The French, while they were feudal slaves, before the Revolution, were the blithest, the most thoughtless, the merriest, and most frolicsome, of mortals; they had no morrows for which to take care, no liberties which to study, no rights which to guard. The English peasant was then, as the French is fast becoming now, grave rather than frivolous, a thinker more than a fiddler, a doer very much more than a dancer. Was he, is he, the less happy, the less respectable, the lower in the scale of intellect, that he is the farther from the monkey, and the nearer to the man? The merriment, the riotous glee, the absolute abandonment of the plantation African to the humor, the glee of the moment, is unapproached by any thing known of human mirthfulness. The gravity, the concentrated thought, the stern abstractedness, the careworn aspect of the free American is proverbial--the first thing observable in him by foreigners. He has more to guard, more at which to aspire, more on which he prides himself, at times almost boastfully, more for which to respect himself, at times almost to the contempt of others, than any mortal man, his co-equal, under any other form of government, on any other soil. Is he the less happy for his cares, or would he change them for the recklessness of the well-clad, well-fed slave--for the thoughtlessness of the first subject in a despotic kingdom?