The Chainbearer or the Littlepage Manuscripts by James Fenimore Cooper

Author:James Fenimore Cooper [Cooper, James Fenimore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III.

"Oh, when shall I visit the land of my birth,

The loveliest land on the face of the earth?

When shall I those scenes of affection explore,

Our forests, our fountains,

Our hamlets, our mountains,

With the pride of our mountains, the maid I adore?"

—Montgomery.

It was truly news for an American, who had been so long cut off from intelligence from home, thus suddenly to be told that some of the scenes of the middle ages—scenes connected with real wrongs and gross abuses of human rights—were about to be enacted in his own land; that country which boasted itself, not only to be the asylum of the oppressed, but the conservator of the right. I was grieved at what I had heard, for, during my travels, I had cherished a much-loved image of justice and political excellence, that I now began to fear must be abandoned. My uncle and myself decided at once to return home, a step that indeed was required by prudence. I was now of an age to enter into the full possession of my own property (so far as "new laws and new lords" would permit); and the letters received by my late guardian, as well as certain newspapers, communicated the unpleasant fact that a great many of the tenants of Ravensnest had joined the association, paid tribute for the support of "Injins," and were getting to be as bad as any of the rest of them, so far as designs and schemes to plunder were concerned, though they still paid their rents. The latter circumstance was ascribed by our agent to the fact that many leases were about to fall in, and it would be in my power to substitute more honest and better-disposed successors for the present occupants of the several farms. Measures were taken accordingly for quitting Paris as soon as possible, so that we might reach home late in the month of May.

"If we had time, I would certainly throw in a memorial or two to the legislature," observed my uncle, a day or two before we proceeded to Havre to join the packet. "I have a strong desire to protest against the invasion of my rights as a freeman that is connected with some of their contemplated laws. I do not at all like the idea of being abridged of the power of hiring a farm for the longest time I can obtain it, which is one of the projects of some of the ultra reformers of free and equal New York. It is wonderful, Hugh, into what follies men precipitate themselves as soon as they begin to run into exaggerations, whether of politics, religion, or tastes. Here are half of the exquisite philanthropists who see a great evil affecting the rights of human nature in one man's hiring a farm from another for as long a term as he can obtain it, who are at the very extreme in their opinion on free trade! So free-trade are some of the journals which think it

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