servants to wealth. Accustomed to ease, and unequal to the struggles
incident to an infant society, the affluent emigrant was barely
enabled to maintain his own rank by the weight of his personal
superiority and acquirements; but, the moment that his head was laid
in the grave, his indolent and comparatively uneducated offspring were
compelled to yield precedency to the more active energies of a class
whose exertions had been stimulated by necessity. This is a very
common course of things, even in the present state of the Union; but
it was peculiarly the fortunes of the two extremes of society, in the
peaceful and unenterprising colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey,

The posterity of Marmaduke did not escape the common lot of those who
depend rather on their hereditary possessions than on their own
powers; and in the third generation they had descended to a point
below which, in this happy country, it is barely possible for honesty,
intellect and sobriety to fall. The same pride of family that had, by
its self-satisfied indolence, conduced to aid their fail, now became a
principle to stimulate them to endeavor to rise again. The feeling,
from being morbid, was changed to a healthful and active desire to
emulate the character, the condition, and, peradventure, the wealth of
their ancestors also. It was the father of our new acquaintance, the
Judge, who first began to reascend in the scale of society; and in
this undertaking he was not a little assisted by a marriage, which
aided in furnishing the means of educating his only son in a rather
better manner than the low state of the common schools of Pennsylvania
could promise; or than had been the practice in the family for the two
or three preceding generations.

At the school where the reviving prosperity of his father was enabled
to maintain him, young Marmaduke formed an intimacy with a youth whose