n, which are to be
the heirs of his possessions, and to enjoy the fruits of his industry.

But to return to poor Belton.

If I have occasion for your assistance, and that of our compeers, in
re-instating the poor fellow, I will give you notice. Mean time, I have
just now been told that Thomasine declares she will not stir; for, it
seems, she suspects that measures will be fallen upon to make her quit.
She is Mrs. Belton, she says, and will prove her marriage.

If she would give herself these airs in his life-time, what would she
attempt to do after his death?

Her boy threatens any body who shall presume to insult their mother.
Their father (as they call poor Belton) they speak of as an unnatural
one. And their probably true father is for ever there, hostilely there,
passing for her cousin, as usual: now her protecting cousin.

Hardly ever, I dare say, was there a keeper that did not make
keeperess; who lavished away on her kept-fellow what she obtained from
the extravagant folly of him who kept her.

I will do without you, if I can. The case will be only, as I conceive,
that like of the ancient Sarmatians, their wives then in possession of
their slaves. So that they had to contend not only with those wives,
conscious of their infidelity, and with their slaves, but with the
children of those slaves, grown up to manhood, resolute to defend their
mothers and their long-manumitted fathers. But the noble Sarmatians,
scorning to attack their slaves with equal weapons, only provided
themselves with the same sort of whips with which they used formerly to
chastise them. And attacking them with them, the miscreants fled before
them.--In memory of which, to this day, the device on the coin in
Novogrod, in Russia, a city of the antient Sarmatia, is a man on
horseback, with a whip in his hand.

The poor fellow takes it ill, that you did not press him more than you
did to be of your party at M. Hall. It is owing to Mowbray, he is sure,
that he had so very slight an invitation from one whose invitations used
to be so warm.

Mowbray's speech to him, he says, he never will forgive: 'Why, Tom,' said
the brutal fellow, with a curse, 'thou droopest like a pip or
roup-cloaking chicken. Thou shouldst grow perter, or submit to a
solitary quarantine, if thou wouldst not infect the whole brood.'

For my own part, only that this poor fellow is in distress, as well in
his affairs as in his mind, or I should be sick of you all.