He gave this second lawyer authority to conclude the
matter, and at last Bearside accepted 20 pounds. When the London
attorney refused to take anything for his trouble, the Senator felt
such conduct almost as an additional grievance. In his existing
frame of mind he would sooner have expended a few more dollars than
be driven to think well of anything connected with English law.
It was immediately after he had handed over the money in
liquidation of Bearside's claim that he sat down to write a further
letter to his friend and correspondent Josiah Scroome. His letter
was not written in the best of tempers; but still, through it all,
there was a desire to be just, and an anxiety to abstain from the
use of hard phrases. The letter was as follows;--
Fenton's Hotel, St. James' Street, London,
Feb. 12, 187-.
My Dear Sir,
Since I last wrote I have had much to trouble me and little perhaps
to compensate me for my trouble. I told you, I think, in one of my
former letters that wherever I went I found myself able to say what
I pleased as to the peculiarities of this very peculiar people. I
am not now going to contradict what I said then. Wherever I go I do
speak out, and my eyes are still in my head and my head is on my
shoulders. But I have to acknowledge to myself that I give offence.
Mr. Morton, whom you knew at the British Embassy in Washington,--
and who I fear is now very ill,--parted from me, when last I saw
him, in anger because of certain opinions I had expressed in a
clergyman's house, not as being ill-founded but as being
antagonistic to the clergyman himself.
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