It was on one of those nights upon which Daddy had received his earnings, that Marston sat in his cheerless chamber, crouched over the faint blaze of a few pieces of wood burning on the bricks of his narrow fire-place, contemplating the eventful scenes of the few years just passed.  The more he contemplated the more it seemed like a dream; his very head wearied with the interminable maze of his difficulties.  Further and further, as he contemplated, did it open to his thoughts the strange social and political mystery of that more strange institution for reducing mankind to the level of brutes.  And yet, democracy, apparently honest, held such inviolable and just to its creed; which creed it would defend with a cordon of steel.  The dejected gentleman sighs, rests his head on his left hand, and his elbow on the little table at his side.  Without, the weather is cold and damp; an incessant rain had pattered upon the roof throughout the day, wild and murky clouds hang their dreary festoons along the heavens, and swift scudding fleeces, driven by fierce, murmuring winds, bespread the prospect with gloom that finds its way into the recesses of the heart.

“Who is worse than a slave!” sighs the rejected man, getting up and looking out of his window into the dreary recesses of the narrow lane.  “If it be not a ruined planter I mistake the policy by which we govern our institution!  As the slave is born a subject being, so is the planter a dependent being.  We planters live in disappointment, in fear, in unhappy uncertainty; and yet we make no preparations for the result.  Nay, we even content ourselves with pleasantly contemplating what may come through the eventful issue of political discord; and when it comes in earnest, we find ourselves the most hapless of unfortunates.  For myself, bereft of all I had once,—­even friends, I am but a forlorn object in the scale of weak mankind!  No man will trust me with his confidence,—­scarce one knows me but to harass me; I can give them no more, and yet I am suspected of having more.  It is so, and ever will be so.  Such are the phases of man’s downfall, that few follow them to the facts, while rumour rules supreme over misfortune.  There may be a fountain of human pain concealed beneath it; but few extend the hand to stay its quickening.  Nay, when all is gone, mammon cries, more! until body and soul are crushed beneath the “more” of relentless self.

“Few know the intricacies of our system; perhaps ’twere well, lest our souls should not be safe within us.  But, ah! my conscience chides me here.  And betwixt those feelings which once saw all things right, but now through necessity beholds their grossest wrongs, comes the pain of self-condemnation.  It is a condemnation haunting me unto death.  Had I been ignorant of Clotilda’s history, the fiendish deed of those who wronged her in her childhood had not now hung like a loathsome pestilence around my very garments.  That which the heart rebukes