While I was dressing, he told me that Mr. Evelyn had been making many enquiries concerning me; and apologized himself, with marks of apprehension lest he should have done wrong, while he owned that he had answered these interrogatories, by relating such particulars as he knew.

We then went down; and, among other conversation at breakfast, Mr. Evelyn remarked that he understood, from Clarke, we had no urgent business which would make a day sooner or a day later of any material consequence; and he therefore particularly requested we would delay our departure till the next morning. The reason he gave was a kind expression of interest, which what he had heard from my companion had excited; and a desire, not of inquisitive prying but evidently of benevolence, to be as fully informed of my history as I should think proper to make him.

There was something soothing both in the request and in his manner, which induced me to readily comply. Poor Clarke excepted, I seemed as if no human being took any concern in my fate; and to discover that there was yet a man who was capable of sympathizing with me was like filling a painful vacancy of the heart, and afforded something of an incoherent hope of relief.

Not that I was prepared to ask or even to accept favours. I had rather entertained a kind of indignant sense of injury, against any one who should presume to make me his debtor: or to suppose I was incapable of not rather enduring all extremities than so to subject and degrade myself as, in my own apprehension, I should do by any such condescension.

After breakfast, Mr. Evelyn desired me to walk with him; that we might converse the more freely when alone. He then repeated what Clarke had told him, gave a strong and affecting picture of the overflowing kindness and compassion with which my companion had related all he knew, and proceeded afterward to speak of himself in the following terms.

'I am a man, Mr. Trevor, engaged in a trust which I find it very difficult conscientiously to discharge. I have an estate of fifteen hundred a year, and am a creature whose real wants, like those of other human creatures, are few. I live here surrounded by some hundreds of acres; stored with fruits, corn, and cattle; which the laws and customs of nations call mine. But what is it that these laws and customs mean? That I am to devour the whole produce of thus much land? The thing is impossible!'

'Why impossible? You may convert a hundred head of oxen into a service of gold plate. Liveries, laces, equipage, gilding, garnishing, and ten thousand other modes or fashionable wants, which if not gratified render those that have them miserable, would eat up all that ten thousand acres, if you had them, could yield. Are you an Epicure? You may so stew, distill, and titillate your palate with essences that a hecatomb shall be swallowed at every meal. The means of devouring are innumerable, and justified by general usage.'

'General usage may be an apology, but not a justification. Happiness is the end of man: but it cannot be single. On the contrary, the more beings are happy the greater is the individual happiness of each: for each is a being of sympathies, and affections; which are increased by being called into action. It is the miserable mechanism of society which, by giving legal possession of what is called property to the holders, puts it absolutely and unconditionally in their disposal.'

'Why the miserable mechanism? Are you a friend to the Agrarian system?'

'By no means. I was incorrect: The mechanism is defective enough, but I rather meant to have said the miserable moral system of society; which allows every man to exercise his own caprice, and thinks him guilty of no crime though he is in the daily habit of wasting that which might render numbers happy, who are in absolute want.'