You speak of the dross of ignorance, whereas my memory dwells
on those precious jewels, which it was my happy fortune, formerly, to
witness, among the treasured glories of the Old World."
"Old World!" retorted the trapper, "that is the miserable cry of all
the half-starved miscreants that have come into this blessed land,
since the days of my boyhood! They tell you of the Old World; as if
the Lord had not the power and the will to create the universe in a
day, or as if he had not bestowed his gifts with an equal hand, though
not with an equal mind, or equal wisdom, have they been received and
used. Were they to say a worn out, and an abused, and a sacrilegious
world, they might not be so far from the truth!"
Doctor Battius, who found it quite as arduous a task to maintain any
of his favourite positions with so irregular an antagonist, as he
would have found it difficult to keep his feet within the hug of a
western wrestler, hemmed aloud, and profited by the new opening the
trapper had made, to shift the grounds of the discussion--
"By Old and New World, my excellent associate," he said, "it is not to
be understood that the hills, and the valleys, the rocks and the
rivers of our own moiety of the earth do not, physically speaking,
bear a date as ancient as the spot on which the bricks of Babylon are
found; it merely signifies that its moral existence is not co-equal
with its physical, or geological formation.
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