flourished, as he said, the only corn-fields in the country, which
supplied the whole nation, and were the property of one individual. So
unrivalled was his agricultural science that the vulgar only accounted
for his admirable produce by a miraculous fecundity! The proprietor of
these hundred golden acres was a rather mysterious sort of personage.
He was an aboriginal inhabitant, and, though the only one of the
aborigines in existence, had lived many centuries, and, to the
consternation of some of the Vraibleusians and the exultation of others,
exhibited no signs of decay. This awful being was without a name. When
spoken of by his admirers he was generally described by such panegyrical
periphrases as 'soul of the country,' 'foundation of the State,' 'the
only real, and true, and substantial being;' while, on the other hand,
those who presumed to differ from those sentiments were in the habit of
styling him 'the dead weight,' 'the vampire,' 'the night-mare,' and
other titles equally complimentary. They also maintained that, instead
of being either real or substantial, he was, in fact, the most flimsy
and fictitious personage in the whole island; and then, lashing
themselves up into metaphor, they would call him a meteor, or a vapour,
or a great windy bubble, that would some day burst.

The Aboriginal insisted that it was the common law of the land that the
islanders should purchase their corn only of him. They grumbled, but he
growled; he swore that it was the constitution of the country; that
there was an uninterrupted line of precedents to confirm the claim; and
that, if they did not approve of the arrangement, they and their fathers
should not have elected to have settled, or presumed to have been
spawned, upon his island. Then, as if he were not desirous of resting
his claim on its mere legal merits, he would remind them of the
superiority of his grain, and the impossibility of a scarcity, in the
event of which calamity an insular people could always find a plentiful