I think I can show that they listen to some purpose. I am
going to surprise my reader with a letter which I received very shortly
after the conversation took place which I have just reported. It is of
course by a special license, such as belongs to the supreme prerogative
of an author, that I am enabled to present it to him. He need ask no
questions: it is not his affair how I obtained the right to give
publicity to a private communication. I have become somewhat more
intimately acquainted with the writer of it than in the earlier period of
my connection with this establishment, and I think I may say have gained
her confidence to a very considerable degree.
MY DEAR SIR: The conversations I have had with you, limited as they have
been, have convinced me that I am quite safe in addressing you with
freedom on a subject which interests me, and others more than myself. We
at our end of the table have been listening, more or less intelligently,
to the discussions going on between two or three of you gentlemen on
matters of solemn import to us all. This is nothing very new to me. I
have been used, from an early period of my life, to hear the discussion
of grave questions, both in politics and religion. I have seen gentlemen
at my father's table get as warm over a theological point of dispute as
in talking over their political differences.
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