“These people,” said he, “belong to a sect of Ascetics in this country, who are persuaded that all pleasure received through the senses is sinful, and that man never appears so acceptable in the sight of the Deity, as when he rejects all the delicacies of the palate, as well as other sensual gratifications, and imposes on himself that food to which he feels naturally most repugnant.  You may see that those peaches, which were so disdainfully thrown into the yard, are often secretly picked up by the children, who obey the impulses of nature, and devour them most greedily.  Even in the old people themselves, there is occasionally some backsliding into the depravity of worldly appetite.  You might have perceived, that while the old man was abusing the wine you drank as unripe, and making wry faces at it, he still kept tasting it; and if I had not reached it to you, he would probably, before he had ceased his meditations, have finished half the bottle.  It must be confessed, that although religion cherishes our best feelings, it also often proves a cloak for the worst.”

I told him that our clergy were superior to this weakness, most of them manifesting a proper sense of the bounty of Providence, by eating and drinking of the best, (not very sparingly neither); and that in New-York, we considered some of our preachers the best judges of wine among us.  Soon afterwards, we again sallied forth in quest of adventures, and bent our course towards the suburbs.

We had not gone far, before we saw several persons looking at a man working hard at a forge, in a low crazy building.  On approaching him, we found he was engaged in making nails, an operation which he performed with great skill and adroitness; and as soon as he had made as many as he could take up in his hand at once, he carried them behind his little hovel, and dropped them into a narrow deep well.  Some of the by-standers wished to beg a few of what he seemed to value so lightly, and others offered to give him bread or clothes in exchange for his nails, but he obstinately resisted all their applications; in fact, little heeding them, although he was almost naked, had a starved, haggard appearance, and evidently regarded the food they proffered with a wishful eye.

The lookers on told us the blacksmith had been for years engaged in this business of nail-making; he worked with little intermission, scarcely allowing himself time for necessary sleep or refreshment; that all the fruits of his incessant labour were disposed of in the manner we had just seen; and that he had already three wells filled with nails, which he had carefully closed.  He had, moreover, a large and productive farm, the increase arising from which, was laid out in exchange for the metal of which his nails were made.  He had, we were informed, so much attachment to these pieces of metal, that he was often on the point of starvation before he would part with one.

I observed to the Brahmin, that it was a singular, and somewhat inexplicable, species of madness.