Page:Tales of my landlord (Volume 1).djvu/136

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
126
TALES OF MY LANDLORD.

otherwise? What has my screech-owl voice, my hideous form, and my mis-shapen features, to do with the fairer workmanship of nature? Do not men receive even my benefits with shrinking horror and ill-suppressed disgust? And why should I interest myself in a race which account me a prodigy and an outcast, and who have treated me as such? No; by all the ingratitude which I have repaid—by all the wrongs which I have sustained—by my imprisonment, my stripes, my chains, I will wrestle down my feelings of rebellious humanity—I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there was an appeal, forsooth, to my feelings, as if I, towards whom none show sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity! Shall I be the idiot to throw this decrepid form, this mis-shapen lump of mortality, under her wheels, that the Dwarf, the Wizard,