y the sects who have
always adhered to it as offensively presuming, and, in a slight degree,
"arisdogradic!" I am a little afraid that your out-and-outers in
politics, religion, love of liberty, and other human excellences, are
somewhat apt to make these circuits in their eccentric orbits, and to
come out somewhere quite near the places from which they started.

The road between the Nest House and Little Nest, the hamlet, is rural,
and quite as agreeable as is usually found in a part of the country that
is without water-views or mountain scenery. Our New York landscapes are
rarely, nay, never grand, as compared with the noble views one finds in
Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the finer parts of Europe; but we have a
vast many that want nothing but a finish to their artificial accessories
to render them singularly agreeable. Such is the case with the principal
vale of Ravensnest, which, at the very moment we were driving through
it, struck my uncle and myself as presenting a picture of rural
abundance, mingled with rural comfort, that one seldom sees in the old
world, where the absence of enclosures, and the concentration of the
dwellings in villages, leave the fields naked and with a desolate
appearance, in spite of their high tillage and crops.

"This is an estate worth contending for, now," said my uncle, as we
trotted slowly on, "although it has not hitherto been very productive to
its owner. The first half century of an American property of this sort
rarely brings much to its proprietor beyond trouble and vexation."

"And after that time the tenant is to have it, pretty much at his own
price, as a reward for his own labour!"

"What evidences are to be found, wherever the eye rests, of the
selfishness of man, and his unfitness to be left to the unlimited
control of his own affairs! In England they are quarrelling with the
landlords, who _do_ compose a real aristocracy, and make the laws, about
the manner in which they protect themselves and the products of their
estates; while here the true owner of the soil is struggling against the
power of numbers, with the people, who are the only aristocrats we
possess, in order to maintain his right of property in the simplest and
most naked form! A common vice is at the bottom of both wrongs, and that
is the vice of selfishness."

"But how are abuses like those of which we complain here--abuses of the
most formidable character of any that can exist, since the oppressors
ar