The tinker ended this speech in a tone of voice so loud that Tim Swallow-whistle felt prompted to look round him for listeners. To his great chagrin, Prim the Puritan stood pricking his ears, but a few yards from Tim's door, with his back turned towards it, but evidently collecting every seditious syllable uttered by the travelling tinker. Tim placed his fore-finger significantly to his lips; and the tinker, marking the direction of Tim's eyes, took the hint, and immediately turned the conversation to the subject of the copper tea-kettle. The tailor's wife was called down-stairs; the kettle was produced; the bargain was readily struck; and the tinker proceeded, out of doors, with his vocation. Tim Swallow-whistle, meanwhile, being left to uninterrupted reflection, turned over and over again, in his mind, the weighty thoughts which had been started by the traveller. Tim could not easily quell the indignation against money-making oppression which the tinker's tale had raised within him; and the plain man's plain reasoning, respecting the rights of the labouring poor, appeared to him uncontradictable; yet all his sympathies for the distressed yielded, at length, to the strength of his common sense, and the consciousness that, care as much as he might, he could not alter the state of the oppressed:— "The world is _as it is_," said Tim to himself, mustering up as much wisdom as he was master of; "it has not been right this many a long year, if all that our forefathers said can be true: and, what's worse, one doesn't see much chance of its being speedily set to rights. But what's the use of grumbling at it, day after day? that would only whitter the flesh off one's poor bones. No, no; what the man says is true enough, no doubt," concluded the soliloquising Swallow-whistle; "but I will not make myself uneasy about what I can't mend: at least I won't any further than I can help. Let the world wag! I'll try to make myself as easy as I can in it, with all its awkwardness. Every dog has his day,—and perhaps mine will come yet." This was no elevated moral channel in which Tim's thoughts were running when the tinker re-entered; but it was one which had served to drain Tim's heart from the troublous inundation of discontent, amid the toils and difficulties of his whole mature life. Tim invited the tinker to take another pipe, and entered on the old subject in a way that showed his mind was made up. "Well, my good friend," he began, "I have been thinking about what has fallen to your lot to see; and I must take the liberty to tell you, that although I cannot help feeling grieved for the distress of others, yet I very much doubt the wisdom of a man dwelling on these thoughts of sorrow till he feels a disposition to be discontented with every thing around him."