f being neglected, since Sir John Goldencalf, with
the reputed annual revenue of three millions of francs, had unlimited
credit with all the inhabitants of the hotel); and I hurried into
my cabinet and sat down to the eager perusal of the different
communications.

Alas! there was not a line from Anna! The obdurate girl still trifled
with my misery; and in revenge I entertained a momentary resolution of
adopting the notions of Mahmoud, in order to qualify myself to set up a
harem.

The letters were from a variety of correspondents, embracing many of
those who were entrusted with the care of my interests in very opposite
quarters of the world. Half an hour before I had been dying to open
more intimate relations with the interesting strangers; but my thoughts
instantly took a new direction, and I soon found that the painful
sentiments I had entertained touching their welfare and happiness were
quite lost in the newly awakened interests that lay before me. It is in
this simple manner, no doubt, that the system to which I am a convert
effects no small part of its own great purposes. No sooner does any one
interest grow painful by excess than a new claim arises to divert the
thoughts, a new demand is made on the sensibilities; and by lowering
our affections from the intensity of selfishness to the more bland and
equable feeling of impartiality, forms that just and generous condition
of the mind at which the political economists aim when they dilate on
the glories and advantages of their favorite theory of the social stake.

In this happy frame of mind I fell to reading the letters with avidity
and with the godlike determination to reverence Providence and to do
justice. Fiat justitia ruat coelum!

The first epistle was from the agent of the principal West India estate.
He acquainted me with the fact that all hopes from the expected crop
were destroyed by a hurricane, and he begged that I would furnish the
means necessary to carry on the affairs of the plantation until another
season might repair the loss. Priding myself on punctuality as a man of
business, before I broke another seal a letter was written to a banker
in London requesting him to supply the necessary credits, and to notify
the agents in the West Indies of the circumstance. As he was a member of
parliament, I seized the occasion also to press upon him the necessity
of government's introducing some early measure for the protection of the
sugar-growers, a most