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" said Newton. "It's no use transplanting them in this weather, but I'll send you a basket in October. You should come down to Newton and see our ferns. We think we're very pretty, but because we're so near, nobody comes to see us." Then he fell a-talking with Mary Bonner, and stayed at the villa nearly all the afternoon. For a moment or two he was alone with Clarissa, and at once expressed his admiration. "I don't think I ever saw such perfect beauty as your cousin's," he said. "She is handsome." "And then she is so fair, whereas everybody expects to see dark eyes and black hair come from the West Indies." "But Mary wasn't born there." "That doesn't matter. The mind doesn't travel back as far as that. A negro should be black, and an American thin, and a French woman should have her hair dragged up by the roots, and a German should be broad-faced, and a Scotchman red-haired,--and a West Indian beauty should be dark and languishing." "I'll tell her you say so, and perhaps she'll have herself altered." "Whatever you do, don't let her be altered," said Mr. Newton. "She can't be changed for the better." "I am quite sure he is over head and ears in love," said Clarissa to Patience that evening. CHAPTER XVI. THE CHESHIRE CHEESE. "Labour is the salt of the earth, and Capital is the sworn foe to Labour." Hear, hear, hear, with the clattering of many glasses, and the smashing of certain pipes! Then the orator went on. "That Labour should be the salt of the earth has been the purpose of a beneficent Creator;--that Capital should be the foe to Labour has been man's handywork. The one is an eternal decree, which nothing can change,--which neither the good nor the evil done by man can affect. The other is an evil ordinance, the fruit of man's ignorance and within the scope of man's intellect to annul." Mr. Ontario Moggs was the orator, and he was at this moment addressing a crowd of sympathising friends in the large front parlour of the Cheshire Cheese. Of all those who were listening to Ontario Moggs there was not probably one who had reached a higher grade in commerce than that of an artizan working for weekly wages;--but Mr. Moggs was especially endeared to them because he was not an artizan working for weekly wages, but himself a capitalist. His father was a master bootmaker on a great scale;--for none stood much higher in the West-end trade than Booby and Moggs; and it was known that Ontario was
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