Cooper's Novels (Volume 5) (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1852. Excerpt: ... what am I to do for these twenty dollars? Name your tarms; this working in the dark is ag'in the grain of my natur'." " You are to tell the truth; we suspect the lugger of being French; and by putting the proof in our hands, you will make us your friends, and serve yourself." Andrea Barrofaldi knew little of America and Americans, but he had imbibed the common European notion that money was the great deity worshipped in this hemisphere, and that all he had to do was to ofFer a bribe, in order to purchase a man of Ithuel's deportment and appearance. In his own island, ten sequins would buy almost any mariner of the port, to do any act short of positive legal criminality; and the idea that a barbarian of the west would refuse such a sum, in preference to selling his shipmates, never crossed his mind. Little, however, did the Italian understand the American. A greater knave than Ithuel, in his own way, it was not easy to find; but it shocked all his notions of personal dignity, self-respect, and republican virtue, to be thus unequivocally offered a bribe; and had the lugger not been so awkwardly circumstanced, he would have been apt to bring matters to a crisis, at once, by throwing the gold into the vice-governatore's face; although, knowing where it was to be found, he might have set about devising some means of cheating the owner out of it, at the very next instant. Boon or bribe, directly and unequivocally offered in the shape of money, as coming from the superior to the inferior, or from the corrupter to the corrupted, had he never taken; and it would have appeared, in his eyes, a species of degradation to receive the first, and of treason to his nationality, to accept the last, though he would lie, invent, manage and contrive, from morning till night, in order to transfer ev...