ook the same course, thinking as he went,
that perhaps the free and independent citizens, who in their moral
elevation, owned the colonel for their master, might render better
homage to the goddess, Liberty, in nightly dreams upon the oven of a
Russian Serf.

The colonel led the way into a room at the back of the house upon
the ground-floor, light, and of fair dimensions, but exquisitely
uncomfortable; having nothing in it but the four cold white walls and
ceiling, a mean carpet, a dreary waste of dining-table reaching from
end to end, and a bewildering collection of cane-bottomed chairs. In the
further region of this banqueting-hall was a stove, garnished on either
side with a great brass spittoon, and shaped in itself like three little
iron barrels set up on end in a fender, and joined together on the
principle of the Siamese Twins. Before it, swinging himself in a
rocking-chair, lounged a large gentleman with his hat on, who amused
himself by spitting alternately into the spittoon on the right hand of
the stove, and the spittoon on the left, and then working his way back
again in the same order. A negro lad in a soiled white jacket was busily
engaged in placing on the table two long rows of knives and forks,
relieved at intervals by jugs of water; and as he travelled down one
side of this festive board, he straightened with his dirty hands the
dirtier cloth, which was all askew, and had not been removed since
breakfast. The atmosphere of this room was rendered intensely hot and
stifling by the stove; but being further flavoured by a sickly gush
of soup from the kitchen, and by such remote suggestions of tobacco as
lingered within the brazen receptacles already mentioned, it became, to
a stranger's senses, almost insupportable.

The gentleman in the rocking-chair having his back towards them, and
being much engaged in his intellectual pastime, was not aware of their
approach until the colonel, walking up to the stove, contributed
his mite towards the support of the left-hand spittoon, just as the
major--for it was the major--bore down upon it. Major Pawkins then
reserved his fire, and looking upward, said, with a peculiar air of
quiet weariness, like a man who had been up all night--an air which
Martin had already observed both in the colonel and Mr Jefferson Brick--

'Well, colonel!'

'Here is a gentleman from England, major,' the colonel replied, 'who
has concluded to locate himself here if the amount of compens