[The Monikins by J. Fenimore Cooper]@TWC D-Link book
The Monikins

CHAPTER XIX
11/14

Noah and myself got through the crowd without injury to our trains, and we separated in the court of the palace; he to go to his bed and dream of his trial on the morrow, and I to go home with Judge People's Friend and the brigadier, who had invited me to finish the evening with a supper.

I was left chatting with the last, while the first went into his closet to indite a dispatch to his government, relating to the events of the evening.
The brigadier was rather caustic in his comments on the incidents of the drawing-room.

A republican himself, he certainly did love to give royalty and nobility some occasional rubs; though I must do this worthy, upright monikin the justice to say, he was quite superior to that vulgar hostility which is apt to distinguish many of his caste, and which is founded on a principle as simple as the fact that they cannot be kings and nobles themselves.
While we were chatting very pleasantly, quite at our ease, and in undress as it were, the brigadier in his bob, and I with my tail aside, Judge People's Friend rejoined us, with his dispatch open in his hand.
He read aloud what he had written, to my great astonishment, for I had been accustomed to think diplomatic communications sacred.

But the judge observed, that in this case it was useless to affect secrecy, for two very good reasons; firstly, because he had been obliged to employ a common Leaphigh scrivener to copy what he had written--his government depending on a noble republican economy, which taught it that, if it did get into difficulties by the betrayal of its correspondence, it would still have the money that a clerk would cost, to help it out of the embarrassment; and, secondly, because he knew the government itself would print it as soon as it arrived.

For his part, he liked to have the publishing of his own works.


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