To descend abruptly from the sublime, to very near the ridiculous, - I had need last summer of a boy to go with a lady on a trap and help about the stable.So I applied to a friend's coachman, a hard-working Englishman, who was delighted to get the place for his nephew - an American-born boy - the child of a sister, in great need.As the boy's clothes were hardly presentable, a simple livery was made for him; from that moment he pined, and finally announced he was going to leave.In answer to my surprised inquiries, I discovered that a friend of his from the same tenement-house in which he had lived in New York had appeared in the village, and sooner than be seen in livery by his play-fellow he preferred abandoning his good place, the chance of being of aid to his mother, and learning an honorable way to earn his living.
Remonstrances were in vain; to the wrath of his uncle, he departed.
The boy had, at his school, heard so much about everybody being born equal and every American being a gentleman by right of inheritance, that he had taken himself seriously, and despised a position his uncle was proud to hold, preferring elegant leisure in his native tenement-house to the humiliation of a livery.