Martin Chuzzlewit

by Charles Dickens

Pecksniff

Thus in the quiet hours of the night, one house shuts in as many incoherent and incongruous fancies as a madman's head.

'what never ran smooth yet, can hardly be expected to change its character for us; so we must take it as we find it, and fashion it into the very best shape we can, by patience and good-humour.

That heart where self has found no place and raised no throne, is slow to recognize its ugly presence when it looks upon it.

Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well that if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always IS depressed, and always IS stagnated, and always IS at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

'Lord love you, sir,' he added, 'they're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her. That's what it's owing to.'

Time, burrowing like a mole below the ground, had marked his track by throwing up another heap of earth. And that was all.