“Dare!” cried the squire. “What daring does it take to write unsigned threats and nail ’em at night on a door? They get more lawless every day, with their committees and town meetings and mobs. ’T is next to impossible to make ’em pay their rents now, and to hear ’em talk ye’d conclude that they owned their farms and could not be turned off. A pretty state of things when a man with twenty thousand acres under leaseholds has to beg for his rentals, and then does n’t get ‘em.”
“You ’d find it easier ter git your rents, squire, if you only sided more with folks, an’ wa’n’t so stiff,” suggested the youth. “A little yieldin’ now an’ then—”
“Never!” roared Mr. Meredith. “I'll have no Committee of Correspondence, nor Sons of Liberty, nor Town Meeting telling me what I may do or not do at Greenwood, any more than I let the ragtag and bobtail tell me what I was to buy in ’69. Till I say nay, tea is drunk at Greenwood,” and the squire’s fist came down on the table with a bang.
“Folks say that Congress will shut up the ports,” said the young man.
“Ay. And British frigates will open ‘em. The people are mad, sir, Bedlam mad, with the idea of liberty, as they call it. Liberty, indeed! when they try to say what a man shall do in his own house; what he shall eat; what he shall wear. And this Congress! We, A and B, elect C to say what the rest of the alphabet shall do, under penalty of tar and feathers, burned ricks, or—don’t talk to me, sir, of a Congress. ’T is but an attempt of the mobility to override the nobility of this land, sir. Once again the plates rattled on the table from the squire’s fist, and it became evident that if Miss Meredith had a temper it came by inheritance.
“Now, Lambert,” interposed his wife, “stop banging the table and getting hot about nothing. Remember how thee hadst the colonies ruined in Stamp Act times, and again during the Association, and it all went over, just as this will. Pour thy father another tankard of small beer, Janice.”
Clearly, what the Committee of Correspondence, and even the approaching Congress could not do, Mrs. Meredith could, for the squire settled back quietly into his chair, took a long swallow of beer, and resumed his letter.
“What does Mr. Cauldwell say, dadda?” inquired the daughter.
“Hmm,” said Mr. Meredith. “That he sends me the likeliest one from his last shipment. What sort of fellow is he, Phil?”
Hennion paused to swallow an over-large mouthful, which almost produced a choking fit, before he could reply. “He han’t a civil word about him, squire—a regular sullen dog.”