y the killers to exercise at times the
privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay
the sticking; but I turned with horror from both processes; and if I
drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and
suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the
butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the
positions which they occupied. To my dislike of the annual cock-fight my
uncles must have contributed. They were loud in their denunciations of
the enormity; and on one occasion, when a neighbour was unlucky enough
to remark, in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down to us
by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw
the habitual respect for the old divines give way, for at least a
moment. Uncle Sandy hesitated under apparent excitement; but, quick and
fiery as lightning, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent
men!" said my uncle, "but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age;
and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the
cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us, they ought
to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and
water." Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute
after; but the practice of fixing the foundations of ethics on a _They
themselves did it_, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed
the foundations of their nonsensical philosophy on a "_He himself said
it_," is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure
Churches, is always provoking, and not quite free from peril to the
worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is
made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that
of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even
the old divines, than to bring up cock-fighting.

My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to
that of my boyhood, its sprinkling of intelligent, book-consulting
mechanics and tradesfolk; and as my acquaintance gradually extended
among their representatives and descendants, I was permitted to rummage,
in the pursuit of knowledge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled
with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which
remained to me consisted of about sixty several works; my uncle
possessed about a hundred and fifty more; and there