"By swaggering could I never thrive,

For the rain it raineth every day.

--Twelfth Night

The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward

between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning the

land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a

letter or two between these personages.

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to

have been cut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages on a

forsaken beach, or "rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many

conquests," it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and

other scandals gossiped about long empires ago:--this world being

apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions are often

minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has

been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links

of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at

last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink

and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at

last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge

enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching

the progress of planetary history from the sun, the one result would be

just as much of a coincidence as the other.

Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling

attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however

little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.

It would be well, certainly, if we could help to reduce their number,

and something might perhaps be done by not lightly giving occasion to

their existence. Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been

generally pronounced a superfluity. But those who like Peter

Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the very last

to wait for such a request either in prose or verse. The copy in this

case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex

frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded

figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.

The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no

order of intelligent beings. Especially when he is suddenly brought

into evidence to frustrate other people's expectations--the very

lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.

But Mr. Rigg Featherstone's low characteristics were all of the sober,

water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day

he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and

old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more

calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself. I will add that

his finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he meant to

marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) whose person was

good, and whose connections, in a solid middle-class way, were

undeniable. Thus his nails and modesty were comparable to those of

most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated only by the

opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial

houses of a seaport. He thought the rural Featherstones very simple

absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a

seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother

Peter, and still more Peter's property, should have had such belongings.




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