nfecting our primitive villagers. According to report, Corcyra
itself never engendered a democrat more awful. The poor man was really
very ill, and his parents very poor; but his unfortunate doctrines dried
up all the streams of charity that usually flowed through our kindly
hamlet. The clergyman (an excellent man, but of the old school) walked
by the house as if it were tabooed. The apothecary said, "Miles Square
ought to have wine;" but he did not send him any. The farmers held his
name in execration, for he had incited all their laborers to strike for
another shilling a week. And but for the old Tower, Miles Square would
soon have found his way to the only republic in which he could obtain
that democratic fraternization for which he sighed; the grave being, I
suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social
equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

My uncle went to see Miles Square, and came back the color of purple.
Miles Square had preached him a long sermon on the unholiness of war.
"Even in defence of your king and country!" had roared the Captain; and
Miles Square had replied with a remark upon kings in general that the
Captain could not have repeated without expecting to see the old Tower
fall about his ears, and with an observation about the country in
particular, to the effect that "the country would be much better off if
it were conquered!" On hearing the report of these loyal and
patriotic replies, my father said "Papoe!" and roused out of his usual
philosophical indifference, went himself to visit Miles Square. My
father returned as pale as my uncle had been purple. "And to think,"
said he mournfully, "that in the town whence this man comes there are,
he tells me, ten thousand other of God's creatures who speed the work of
civilization while execrating its laws!"

But neither father nor uncle made any opposition when, with a basket
laden with wine and arrowroot, and a neat little Bible bound in brown,
my mother took her way to the excommunicated cottage. Her visit was as
signal a failure as those that preceded it. Miles Square refused the
basket,--"he was not going to accept alms and eat the bread of charity;"
and on my mother meekly suggesting that "if Mr. Miles Square would
condescend to look into the Bible, he would see that even charity was
no sin in giver or recipient," Mr. Miles Square had undertaken to prove
"that, according to the Bible, he had as much a ri