"Why, Major, I believe you're a friend to justice and the right, though you go so often to the grand house; but it's a hard case to a man, to have his honest calling for a livelihood stopt by sitch laws, and that too when, if right was done, he mought hunt or fish on any day in the week, or on the best flat in the Patent, if he was so minded."
"I unterstant you, Letter-stockint," returned the Major, fixing his black eyes, with a look of peculiar meaning, on the hunter; "put you tidn't use to pe so prutent, as to look ahet mit so much care."
"Maybe there wasn't so much 'casion," said the hunter, a little sulkily; when he sunk into a profound silence, from which he was not roused for some time.
"The Judge was saying so'thin about the French," Hiram observed, when the pause in the conversation had continued a decent time.
"Yes, sir," returned Marmaduke, "the Jacobins of France seem rushing from one act of licentiousness to another. They continue those murders, which are dignified by the name of executions. You have heard, that they have added the death of their Queen to the long list of their crimes."
"Les Bêtes!" again murmured Monsieur Le Quoi, turning himself suddenly in his chair, with a convulsive start.
"The province of La Vendée is laid waste by the troops of the republic, and hundreds of its inhabitants, who are royalists in their sentiments, are shot at a time.—La Vendée is a district in the south-west of France, that continues yet much attached to the family of the Bourbons: doubtless Monsieur Le Quoi is acquainted with it, and can describe it more faithfully."
