keeping the horse on a very slow gait,
being in no particular hurry to quit my present fair companion.

Mary and I had now a free, and, in some tense, a confidential dialogue.
Her manner towards me had entirely changed; for, while it maintained the
modesty and _retenue_ of her sex and station, it displayed much of that
frankness which was the natural consequence of her great intimacy at the
Nest, and; as I have since ascertained, of her own ingenuous nature. The
circumstance, too, that she now felt she was with one of her own class,
who had opinions, habits, tastes and thoughts like her own, removed a
mountain of restraint, and made her communications natural and easy. I
was near an hour, I do believe, in driving the two miles that lay
between the point where the Injins had been met and the village, and in
that hour Mary Warren and I became better acquainted than would have
been the case, under ordinary circumstances, in a year.

In the first place, I explained the reasons and manner of my early and
unexpected return home, and the motives by which I had been governed in
thus coming in disguise on my own property. Then I said a little of my
future intentions, and of my disposition to hold out to the last against
every attempt on my rights, whether they might come from the open
violence and unprincipled designs of those below, or the equally
unprincipled schemes of those above. A spurious liberty and political
cant were things that I despised, as every intelligent and independent
man must; and I did not intend to be persuaded I was an aristocrat,
merely because I had the habits of a gentleman, at the very moment when
I had less political influence than the hired labourers in my own
service.

Mary Warren manifested a spirit and an intelligence that surprised me.
She expressed her own belief that the proscribed classes of the country
had only to be true to themselves to be restored to their just rights,
and that on the very principle by which they were so fast losing them.
The opinions she thus expressed are worthy of being recorded.

"Everything that is done in that way," said this gentle, but admirable
creature, "has hitherto been done on a principle that is quite as false
and vicious as that by which they are now oppressed. We have had a great
deal written and said, lately, about uniting people of property, but it
has been so evidently with an intention to make money rule, and that in
its most vulgar and vicious manne