with a
loan, and if he don't pay it pretty quickly, accommodates him, with a
chain to his foot. Accommodate! God forbid that I should ever be
accommodated. No, no. Look you, as I told that cousin-german of yours,
the herb-doctor, I'm now on the road to get me made some sort of machine
to do my work. Machines for me. My cider-mill--does that ever steal my
cider? My mowing-machine--does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My
corn-husker--does that ever give me insolence? No: cider-mill,
mowing-machine, corn-husker--all faithfully attend to their business.
Disinterested, too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives
long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward--the only practical
Christians I know."

"Oh dear, dear, dear, dear!"

"Yes, sir:--boys? Start my soul-bolts, what a difference, in a moral
point of view, between a corn-husker and a boy! Sir, a corn-husker, for
its patient continuance in well-doing, might not unfitly go to heaven.
Do you suppose a boy will?"

"A corn-husker in heaven! (turning up the whites of his eyes). Respected
sir, this way of talking as if heaven were a kind of Washington
patent-office museum--oh, oh, oh!--as if mere machine-work and
puppet-work went to heaven--oh, oh, oh! Things incapable of free agency,
to receive the eternal reward of well-doing--oh, oh, oh!"

"You Praise-God-Barebones you, what are you groaning about? Did I say
anything of that sort? Seems to me, though you talk so good, you are
mighty quick at a hint the other way, or else you want to pick a polemic
quarrel with me."

"It may be so or not, respected sir," was now the demure reply; "but if
it be, it is only because as a soldier out of honor is quick in taking
affront, so a Christian out of religion is quick, sometimes perhaps a
little too much so, in spying heresy."

"Well," after an astonished pause, "for an unaccountable pair, you and
the herb-doctor ought to yoke together."

So saying, the bachelor was eying him rather sharply, when he with the
brass plate recalled him to the discussion by a hint, not unflattering,
that he (the man with the brass plate) was all anxiety to hear him
further on the subject of servants.

"About that matter," exclaimed the impulsive bachelor, going off
at the hint like a rocket, "all thinking minds are, now-a-days,
coming to the conclusion--one derived from an immense hereditary
experience--see what Horace and others of the ancients say of
servants--coming to the concl