The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
with the result of bad government; their association with the
Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was
light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull
them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and
even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would
not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there
was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect
order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was,
moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in
Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the
candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred
matters about which he knew nothing at all,--and always given, in spite
of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of
taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it
for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt
under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such
superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every
one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent.
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