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