Cornelius Dalton persisted notwithstanding this great act of contemptuosity and discouragement to his creditable and industrious endeavors, to expend, upon the aforesaid farm, in solid and valuable improvements, a sum of seven hundred pounds and upwards, in building, draining, enclosing, and manuring—­all of which improvements transcendantly elevated the value of the farm in question, as the whole rational population of the country could depose to—­me ipso teste quoque.  That when this now highly emendated tenement was brought to the best condition of excellence of which it was susceptible, the middleman landlord—­va miseris agricolis!—­called upon him for an elevation of rent, which was reluctantly complied with, under the tyrannical alternative of threatened ejection, incarceration of cattle, &c, &c, and many other proceedings equally inhuman and iniquitous.  That this rack-rent, being now more than the land could pay, began to paralyze the efforts, and deteriorate the condition of the said Mr. Cornelius Dalton; and which, being concatenated with successive failures in his crops, and mortality among his cattle, occasioned him, as it were, to retrogade from his former state; and in the course of a few calamitous years, to decline, by melancholy gradation and oppressive treatment from Richard Henderson, Esq., J.P., his landlord, to a state of painful struggle and poverty.  That the said Richard Henderson, Esq., his unworthy landlord, having been offered a still higher rent, from a miserable disciple, named Darby Skinadre, among others, unfeelingly availed himself of Dalton’s res augusta—­and under play of his privileges as a landlord, levied an execution upon his property, auctioned him out, and expelled him from the farm; thus turning a respectable man and his family, hopeless and houseless, beggars upon the world, to endure misery and destitution.  That the said Mr. Cornelius Dalton, now plain Corny Dalton—­for vile poverty humilifies even the name—­or rather his respectable family, among whom, facile princeps, for piety and unshaken trust in her Redeemer, stands his truly unparalleled wife, are lying in a damp wet cabin within about two hundred perches of his former residence, groaning with the agonies of hunger, destitution, dereliction, and disease, in such a state of complicated and multiform misery as rarely falls to the lot of human eyes to witness.  That the burthen and onus of this petition is, to humbly supplicate that Mr. Cornelius Dalton, or rather his afflicted and respectable family, may be reinstated in their farm as aforesaid, or if not, that Richard Henderson, J.P., may be compelled to swallow such a titillating emetic from the head landlord as shall compel him to eructate to this oppressed and plundered man all the money he expended in making improvements, which remain to augment the value of the farm, but which, at the same time, were the means of ruining himself and his most respectable family:  for, as the bard says, ‘sio vos non vobis,’ &c, &c.  Of the remainder of this appropriate quotation, your honor cannot be incognizant, or any man who has had the advantage of being college-bred, as every true gentleman or ‘homo factus ad unguem’ must have, otherwise he fails to come under this category.—­And your petitioner will ever pray.”