"That may be philosophy, my friend," he replied, "but a heart ill at ease finds little of comfort in it. You knew my father: need I say he was one of the excellent of the earth--a man who held directly from God Almighty the patent of his honours? I saw that father sink broken-hearted into the grave, the victim of legalized oppression--yes, saw him overborne in the long contest which his high spirit and his indomitable love of the right had incited him to maintain--overborne by a mean, despicable scoundrel, one of the creeping things of the earth. Heaven knows I did my utmost to assist in the struggle. In my fifteenth year, Mr. Lindsay, when a thin, loose-jointed boy, I did the work of a man, and strained my unknit and overtoiled sinews as if life and death depended on the issue, till oft, in the middle of the night, I have had to fling myself from my bed to avoid instant suffocation--an effect of exertion so prolonged and so premature. Nor has the man exerted himself less heartily than the boy--in the roughest, severest labours of the field, I have never yet met a competitor. But my labours have been all in vain--I have seen the evil bewailed by Solomon--the righteous man falling down before the wicked." I could answer only with a sigh. "You are in the right," he continued, after a pause, and in a more subdued tone: "man is certainly misplaced--the present scene of things is below the dignity of both his moral and intellectual nature. Look round you--(we had reached the summit of a grassy eminence which rose over the wood, and commanded a pretty extensive view of the surrounding country)--see yonder scattered cottages, that, in the faint light, rise dim and black amid the stubble fields--my heart warms as I look on them, for I know how much of honest worth, and sound, generous feeling shelters under these roof-trees. But why so much of moral excellence united to a mere machinery for ministering to the ease and luxury of a few of, perhaps, the least worthy of our species--creatures so spoiled by prosperity that the claim of a common nature has no force to move them, and who seem as miserably misplaced as the myriads whom they oppress?" "If I'm designed yon lordling's slave-- By nature's law designed-- Why was an independent wish E'er planted in my mind? If not, why am I subject to His cruelty and scorn? Or why has man the will and power To make his fellow mourn?"