tin case of spirits.

The worthy man proceeded at some length with these dispiriting
particulars. Nor would his cheery companion wholly deny that there might
be a point of view from which such a case of extreme want of confidence
might, to the humane mind, present features not altogether welcome as
wine and olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory
considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for
evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a
somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's
words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way was
not to be condemned.

The other was not disposed to question the justice of Shakespeare's
thought, but would hardly admit the propriety of the application in this
instance, much less of the comment. So, after some further temperate
discussion of the pitiable miser, finding that they could not entirely
harmonize, the merchant cited another case, that of the negro cripple.
But his companion suggested whether the alleged hardships of that
alleged unfortunate might not exist more in the pity of the observer
than the experience of the observed. He knew nothing about the cripple,
nor had seen him, but ventured to surmise that, could one but get at the
real state of his heart, he would be found about as happy as most men,
if not, in fact, full as happy as the speaker himself. He added that
negroes were by nature a singularly cheerful race; no one ever heard of
a native-born African Zimmermann or Torquemada; that even from religion
they dismissed all gloom; in their hilarious rituals they danced, so to
speak, and, as it were, cut pigeon-wings. It was improbable, therefore,
that a negro, however reduced to his stumps by fortune, could be ever
thrown off the legs of a laughing philosophy.

Foiled again, the good merchant would not desist, but ventured still a
third case, that of the man with the weed, whose story, as narrated by
himself, and confirmed and filled out by the testimony of a certain man
in a gray coat, whom the merchant had afterwards met, he now proceeded
to give; and that, without holding back those particulars disclosed by
the second informant, but which delicacy had prevented the unfortunate
man himself from touching upon.

But as the good merchant could, perhaps, do better justice to the man
than the story, we shall venture to tell it in other words than his,
though not