We quitted the streets together for the neighbouring fields, and, after the natural interchange of mutual congratulations--"How is it," I inquired, "that you do not seem to have a single acquaintance among all the gay and great of the country?" "I lie under quarantine," he replied; "tainted by the plague of liberalism. There is not one of the hundreds we passed to-night whom I could not once reckon among my intimates." The intelligence stunned and irritated me. "How infinitely absurd!" I said. "Do they dream of sinking you into a common man?" "Even so," he rejoined. "Do they not all know I have been a gauger for the last five years!" The fact had both grieved and incensed me long before. I knew, too, that Pye enjoyed his salary as poet laureate of the time, and Dibdin, the song writer, his pension of two hundred a-year, and I blushed for my country. "Yes," he continued--the ill-assumed coolness of his manner giving way before his highly excited feelings--"they have assigned me my place among the mean and the degraded, as their best patronage; and only yesterday, after an official threat of instant dismission, I was told it was my business to act, not to think. God help me! what have I done to provoke such bitter insult? I have ever discharged my miserable duty--discharged it, Mr. Lindsay, however repugnant to my feelings, as an honest man; and though there awaited me no promotion, I was silent. The wives or sisters of those whom they advanced over me had bastards to some of the ---- family, and so their influence was necessarily greater than mine. But now they crush me into the very dust. I take an interest in the struggles of the slave for his freedom; I express my opinions as if I myself were a free man; and they threaten to starve me and my children if I dare so much as speak or think." I expressed my indignant sympathy in a few broken sentences; and he went on with kindling animation:--