Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/254

 appeared to indicate that the owner of it considered himself a person of very great importance. The expression of this man's face said as plainly as if the words had been written there in characters larger and far less ambiguous than those of an Act of Parliament, that he considered himself as being not only absolute master of all the land for miles on miles round about, but also absolute master of all the human beings who had the misfortune to live on that land. There was something in the haughty, insolent, despotic look of this man which roused the Englishman's combativeness. And as the latter returned his haughty look, which seemed to demand what right a "gutterblood" had to be walking on his domain with a fishing-rod in his hand, there was something in the expression of his features that seemed to be new to the rural magnate, accustomed as he was to domineer among dependents [sic] and the smaller lairds who looked upon him as a small god—a very small one indeed—and to rouse in him an emotion of rage, mixed with some other emotions he did not much care to analyze—inasmuch as an emotion very much akin to fear lay coiled up among them.

The carriage rolled on, and, by a turn of the road, was soon out of sight. And the pedestrian