shoulders.  But I have to acknowledge to myself that I give offence.  Mr. Morton, whom you knew at the British Embassy in Washington,—­ and who I fear is now very ill,—­parted from me, when last I saw him, in anger because of certain opinions I had expressed in a clergyman’s house, not as being ill-founded but as being antagonistic to the clergyman himself.  This I feel to be unreasonable.  And in the neighbourhood of Mr. Morton’s house, I have encountered the ill will of a great many, not for having spoken untruth, for that I have never heard alleged, but because I have not been reticent in describing the things which I have seen.

I told you, I think, that I had returned to Mr. Morton’s neighbourhood with the view of defending an oppressed man against the power of the lord who was oppressing him.  Unfortunately for me the lord, though a scapegrace, spends his money freely and is a hospitable kindly-hearted honest fellow; whereas the injured victim has turned out to be a wretched scoundrel.  Scoundrel though he is, he has still been ill used; and the lord, though good-natured, has been a tyrant.  But the poor wretch has thrown me over and sold himself to the other side and I have been held up to ignominy by all the provincial newspapers.  I have also had to pay through the nose 175 dollars for my quixotism—­a sum which I cannot very well afford.  This money I have lost solely with the view of defending the weak, but nobody with whom I have discussed the matter seems to recognise the purity of my object.  I am only reminded that I have put myself into the same boat with a rascal.

I feel from day to day how thoroughly I could have enjoyed a sojourn in this country if I had come here without any line of duty laid down for myself.  Could I have swum with the stream and have said yes or no as yes or no were expected, I might have revelled in generous hospitality.  Nothing can be pleasanter than the houses here if you will only be as idle as the owners of them.  But when once you show them that you have an object, they become afraid of you.  And industry,—­in such houses as I now speak of, is a crime.  You are there to glide through the day luxuriously in the house,—­ or to rush through it impetuously on horseback or with a gun if you be a sportsman.  Sometimes, when I have asked questions about the most material institutions of the country, I have felt that I was looked upon with absolute loathing.  This is disagreeable.

And yet I find it more easy in this country to sympathise with the rich than with the poor.  I do not here describe my own actual sympathies, but only the easiness with which they might be evoked.  The rich are at any rate pleasant.  The poor are very much the reverse.  There is no backbone of mutiny in them against the oppression to which they are subjected; but only the whining of a dog that knows itself to be a slave and pleads with his soft paw for tenderness from his master; or the futile growlings of the caged