The colonel was by this time seated on the table again. Mr Brick also took up a position on that same piece of furniture; and they fell to drinking pretty hard. They often looked at Martin as he read the paper, and then at each other. When he laid it down, which was not until they had finished a second bottle, the colonel asked him what he thought of it.
‘Why, it’s horribly personal,’ said Martin.
The colonel seemed much flattered by this remark; and said he hoped it was.
‘We are independent here, sir,’ said Mr Jefferson Brick. ‘We do as we like.’
‘If I may judge from this specimen,’ returned Martin, ‘there must be a few thousands here, rather the reverse of independent, who do as they don’t like.’
‘Well! They yield to the popular mind of the Popular Instructor, sir,’ said the colonel. ‘They rile up, sometimes; but in general we have a hold upon our citizens, both in public and in private life, which is as much one of the ennobling institutions of our happy country as—’
‘As nigger slavery itself,’ suggested Mr Brick.
‘En—tirely so,’ remarked the colonel.
‘Pray,’ said Martin, after some hesitation, ‘may I venture to ask, with reference to a case I observe in this paper of yours, whether the Popular Instructor often deals in—I am at a loss to express it without giving you offence—in forgery? In forged letters, for instance,’ he pursued, for the colonel was perfectly calm and quite at his ease, ‘solemnly purporting to have been written at recent periods by living men?’
‘Well, sir!’ replied the colonel. ‘It does, now and then.’