“Weel, sir,” said he, “it isn’t much that the like o’ me has got to say; only, ye see, Mr Hamilton here, that ye ca’ a prisoner, is an auld owner’s son o’ mine. I have known him since he was the height o’ my knee, and he was always a guid and a cannie laddie; and I venture to say, had his father not been ower honest a man, and paid twenty shillings in the pound to every body, he wouldna hae been in his grave to-day. As for the thing that is carrying on the prosecution against Mr Hamilton, I knaw something o’ him tae; and he may think himself weel off that it wasna a wife o’ mine that he shewed his blackguardism to, for had I been my auld maister’s son, hang me! after the insults I saw him offer to this bonny lady here, when they were both passengers on board o’ my ship, Jemmy Johnson, take me! if I wudna hae twisted his neck off his shoulders in a moment!”
The counsel for the prosecution had risen to ridicule the evidence of the prisoner, when he was interrupted by a negro servant of the Honourable Edward Stafford, who had been touched by the fiery eloquence of Alexander and the distress of his wife, and who rose and exclaimed, while others attempted to keep him down—“Me will speak!—Massa be de grand villain! Me be black, but you won’t make me one black heart. De prisoner be innocent! Massa do owe him von hundred pound, for me carried it to massa, and massa did try to steal de wife ob Massa Hamilton; which, be bad—berry bad! Prisoner be de injured man, like de poor African!”
This involuntary testimony on the part of the negro arrested the attention of both judge and jury, and they were requesting that he should be placed in the witness-box, when two gentlemen hurriedly entered the court, and pressed forward, requesting to be heard. The one stated himself to be a Mr Fulton, a broker in Cornhill. With him Alexander’s father had long had extensive dealings. He has already been mentioned in the course of this narrative. Alexander had requested that his wife should address her letters to him to his counting-house. But he was abroad when Alexander reached London, and he only arrived on the evening before his trial. He knew the services which his friend, the elder Hamilton, and his son also, had conferred upon the member of parliament of whom we have spoken, and calling upon him, and hearing the accusations that were preferred against Alexander by Stafford, he demanded that they should be probed to the bottom. They did investigate into them, and they discovered them to be wholly false and without foundation. And the patron now came forward to express his contrition for the act of injustice into which he had been betrayed, and to bear his testimony against the character and malignity of the prosecutor. A change came over the countenances of the jury. The judge seemed perplexed, and was rising to sum up the evidence, when they rose as one man, and exclaimed—“Not guilty.”
“Not guilty, my lord,” repeated the foreman of the jury; “but it would give us pleasure to see the accuser stand where the accused has this day stood.”
The spectators burst into a shout, and the Honourable Edward Stafford endeavoured to escape from the court. All that is necessary to add is, that Alexander Hamilton became the clerk of Mr Fulton, in a few years his partner, and eventually his successor, and his latter days were more prosperous than any that his father had known, while the worth of his wife and her affection increased with age. One word respecting the Honourable Edward Stafford, and I have done. In a few years he became a titled beggar, and twenty years afterwards, when Alexander Hamilton, with his wife and family came to reside in Northumberland, where they had been born and brought up, they heard of a poor gentleman at an inn in the next village, who seemed to be in great distress. They went to visit him—it was the Honourable Edward Stafford. He wept as he recognised them. In the words of holy writ—they heaped coals of fire upon his head—and with his hand in Alexander’s he breathed his last, and at their own expense they buried him with his fathers. Such are a few Leaves from the Life of Alexander Hamilton.
THE SPORTSMAN OF OUTFIELDHAUGH.
The old property of Eyrymount—belonging to a sept of the Græmes that had at a former period emigrated to that locality, not far from the Borders of Scotland, and possessed, at the time we speak of, by Hugo Græme, a man somewhat advanced in years—was (for it has latterly been broken down into small portions) one of the finest small possessions of a commoner that could be seen in the fairest part of Scotland. Compact, and divided into two portions—one of the richest arable soil, and another, where the mansion-house stood, of planted ground, adorned by green trees and flowering shrubs—it was just that kind of property which, filling the purse and pleasing the eye, a man of sense and a lover of nature would choose to occupy and draw the rents of. The proprietor of this fine retreat—Hugo, of the fourth generation of these Græmes—was the very worst kind of man that could have been placed upon such an estate; for he held that kind of middle station between the exclusive great and the not exclusive, which, producing discontentment with what is in one’s power, and generating an ambition seldom realized, neutralizes all the advantages of independence, and changes the gifts of Providence into gilded evils. The property was too small to enable him to cope with those whom he wished to associate with, while it was too extensive to admit of its proprietor being classed with many of the neighbouring lairds. Yet his pride struggled with the physical impossibilities with which the limited nature of Eyrymount surrounded him; and his life for many years had been occupied by a series of efforts to make up, by art and diplomacy, what could not be wrung from his patrimonial inheritance. His wife, Madam Græme—as she was styled by the neighbours, from her possession of a pride equal to, if not transcending that of her husband—was the daughter of a rich banker, who, after her marriage, lost his wealth, and, of course, the charm which procured for him the enviable title of father-in-law to Hugo Græme of Eyrymount, the fourth lineal heir of the southern sept of the Græmes. The pride which had been generated in the bosom of the young lady by expectation, was not relinquished with her hope of succeeding to a fortune that had taken to itself “the wings of the morning.” Bringing in this way no riches to her husband, she did not leave behind her the evils which generally attend them and often survive them; and the hundred thousand pounds she expected to succeed to, though now in the pockets of other people, and feeding a pride of a more legitimate kind in the bosoms of the possessors, founded that kind of claim to honour which a ragged heir of a thousand acres which have been out of his family for fifty years, thinks he has a right to assume, from the mere circumstance of his grandfather having been the laird. The pride of the master and mistress of Eyrymount, strong in the original stems, was strengthened, but not, like the forest crab-apple, improved, by the mutual ingrafture of connubial sympathy; and they strained and pulled together, in their efforts to stretch the income of Eyrymount into the means of supporting a state to which it was inadequate.
An only child—a female, of considerable pretensions to beauty, simple and humble, and highly interesting in her manners, and called, after her mother, Dione, a title of which Madam Græme was very proud—added considerably to the pride of the haughty couple. They expected “to turn her to account,” and had already fixed their eyes on an old rich nabob, called Benjamin Rice, who had taken up his residence at Pansey Lodge, in the neighbourhood, as a very suitable and easy kind of person, who would likely have no objection to enter without much struggle into the matrimonial noose. They never thought of consulting Dione on the subject; for, though they did not dispute that she had “some interest” in the affair, they took for granted that, as one of the family, she was solicitous for the enhancement of its fortunes, and would at once sell herself for the good of the Græmes of Eyrymount. The nabob was not averse, at least in the first instance, to partake of the fine dinners, served up as a costly kind of bait at Eyrymount House. The dyspepsia, which, along with his rupees, he had caught in India, made him nice in the selection of his food and wine; and no cost was spared by the fortune-hunting Amphytrions, to procure for him whatever might please his palate. Neither had the nabob any disinclination to feast his eyes on the fair face of Dione, who received his looks and attentions very much in the way that children do that emetic Indian shrub, called ipecacuanha. The tyranny of her proud mother, however, prevented her from shewing symptoms of displeasure, when she felt herself subjected to his scrutiny; and, as yet, no hint had been given that he was selected as the man who was to make her “happy for life.”