If she would give herself these airs in his life-time, what would she attempt to do after his death?

Her boy threatens any body who shall presume to insult their mother.  Their father (as they call poor Belton) they speak of as an unnatural one.  And their probably true father is for ever there, hostilely there, passing for her cousin, as usual:  now her protecting cousin.

Hardly ever, I dare say, was there a keeper that did not make keeperess; who lavished away on her kept-fellow what she obtained from the extravagant folly of him who kept her.

I will do without you, if I can.  The case will be only, as I conceive, that like of the ancient Sarmatians, their wives then in possession of their slaves.  So that they had to contend not only with those wives, conscious of their infidelity, and with their slaves, but with the children of those slaves, grown up to manhood, resolute to defend their mothers and their long-manumitted fathers.  But the noble Sarmatians, scorning to attack their slaves with equal weapons, only provided themselves with the same sort of whips with which they used formerly to chastise them.  And attacking them with them, the miscreants fled before them.—­In memory of which, to this day, the device on the coin in Novogrod, in Russia, a city of the antient Sarmatia, is a man on horseback, with a whip in his hand.

The poor fellow takes it ill, that you did not press him more than you did to be of your party at M. Hall.  It is owing to Mowbray, he is sure, that he had so very slight an invitation from one whose invitations used to be so warm.

Mowbray’s speech to him, he says, he never will forgive:  ‘Why, Tom,’ said the brutal fellow, with a curse, ’thou droopest like a pip or roup-cloaking chicken.  Thou shouldst grow perter, or submit to a solitary quarantine, if thou wouldst not infect the whole brood.’

For my own part, only that this poor fellow is in distress, as well in his affairs as in his mind, or I should be sick of you all.  Such is the relish I have of the conversation, and such my admiration of the deportment and sentiments of this divine lady, that I would forego a month, even of thy company, to be admitted into her’s but for one hour:  and I am highly in conceit with myself, greatly as I used to value thine, for being able, spontaneously as I may say, to make this preference.

It is, after all, a devilish life we have lived.  And to consider how it all ends in a very few years—­to see to what a state of ill health this poor fellow is so soon reduced—­and then to observe how every one of ye run away from the unhappy being, as rats from a falling house, is fine comfort to help a man to look back upon companions ill-chosen, and a life mis-spent!

It will be your turns by-and-by, every man of ye, if the justice of your country interpose not.

Thou art the only rake we have herded with, if thou wilt not except thyself, who hast preserved entire thy health and thy fortunes.