ra after dinner, if it deserves the name, but as soon as I had done
I made my excuses--"indispensable business--obliged to go out of town,
&c." and fled to an eating-house, where I satisfied what Dan Homer
emphatically calls the "thumos edodes," the madness of appetite, with
something more to the purpose than lean mutton.

Mr. Longford was "none of them sort;"--he retired from business with
only fifty thousand dollars, but with a clear conscience, adjusted
books, and not a single cent of debt--he never refused his charity to
deserving objects, and never signed a subscription paper for their
relief,--he was never a member of a charitable society, and never
contributed a cent to the Missionary funds, whether for the Valley of
the Mississippi or the Island of Borneo, where there are nothing but
monkeys, or Malays as incapable of being christianized as the monkeys.
Had he lived at the present time, and in this section of the country, he
would have been prayed _for_ and prayed _at_, at least once a day, and
been, besides, occasionally held up in the pulpit as a specimen of total
depravity, and a child of perdition.

Yet, with all these defects, Mr. George Longford was a sincerely devout
man, and a most firm believer in the Christian religion,--from a
conviction of its truth, not merely because it was the fashion to
believe it, or because his fathers believed it before him,--and a
practical observer of its moral precepts. He read and studied the New
Testament, because it contained a compendium of all his every-day duties
as a rational and accountable being, and as a member of society, not
because it was a magazine of polemical divinity and abstruse doctrines.
The evening of such a man's life is calm and tranquil; his death is
indeed the death of the righteous.

James was this man's eldest son;--I cannot say, as novel writers
generally do, that "in him were centred the hopes and wishes of his fond
parents,"--for they were not--they looked for support and comfort in
their old age to their other children. James was a refractory and
disobedient child from the very cradle. It is ridiculous to say that all
men are born alike in dispositions and capacities; the great poet of
nature, from whom I have, as usual, taken my text, says no; and I would
sooner have a single line from him than folios of ingenious theories and
metaphysical arguments from the profoundest philosophers. I have not
much faith in innate ideas, but I confess that