everything they prized! Of course I know all the ordinary commonplaces of
life as well as any one,--that if you build a house with your hand or
your money, and let it, the rent of it is your just due; and must be
paid. But yet--

"Don't you think, sir," I said that evening at dinner, the subject being
reintroduced by my father himself, "that we have some duty towards them
when we draw so much from them?"

"Certainly," he said; "I take as much trouble about their drains as I do
about my own."

"That is always something, I suppose."

"Something! it is a great deal; it is more than they get anywhere else. I
keep them clean, as far as that's possible. I give them at least the
means of keeping clean, and thus check disease, and prolong life, which
is more, I assure you, than they've any right to expect."

I was not prepared with arguments as I ought to have been. That is all in
the Gospel according to Adam Smith, which my father had been brought up
in, but of which the tenets had begun to be less binding in my day. I
wanted something more, or else something less; but my views were not so
clear, nor my system so logical and well-built, as that upon which my
father rested his conscience, and drew his percentage with a light heart.

Yet I thought there were signs in him of some perturbation. I met him one
morning coming out of the room in which the portrait hung, as if he had
gone to look at it stealthily. He was shaking his head, and saying "No,
no," to himself, not perceiving me, and I stepped aside when I saw him so