Scribner’s Magazine.  Copyrighted by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

SINS OF CIRCUMSTANCE

From ‘Sentimental Tommy’

With the darkness, too, crept into the Muckley certain devils in the color of the night who spoke thickly and rolled braw lads in the mire, and egged on friends to fight, and cast lewd thoughts into the minds of the women.  At first the men had been bashful swains.  To the women’s “Gie me my faring, Jock,” they had replied, “Wait, Jean, till I’m fee’d,” but by night most had got their arles, with a dram above it, and he who could only guffaw at Jean a few hours ago had her round the waist now, and still an arm free for rough play with other kimmers.  The Jeans were as boisterous as the Jocks, giving them leer for leer, running from them with a giggle, waiting to be caught and rudely kissed.  Grand, patient, long-suffering fellows these men were, up at five, summer and winter, foddering their horses, maybe, hours before there would be food for themselves, miserably paid, housed like cattle, and when the rheumatism seized them, liable to be flung aside like a broken graip.  As hard was the life of the women:  coarse food, chaff beds, damp clothes their portion; their sweethearts in the service of masters who were loth to fee a married man.  Is it to be wondered that these lads who could be faithful unto death drank soddenly on their one free day; that these girls, starved of opportunities for womanliness, of which they could make as much as the finest lady, sometimes woke after a Muckley to wish that they might wake no more?

Scribner’s Magazine.  Copyrighted by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

FREDERIC BASTIAT

(1801-1850)

Political economy has been called the “dismal science”; and probably the majority think of it as either merely a matter of words and phrases, or as something too abstruse for the common mind to comprehend.  It was the distinction of Bastiat that he was able to write economic tracts in such a language that he that ran might read, and to clothe the apparently dry bones with such integuments as manifested vitality.  Under his pen, questions of finance, of tax, of exchange, became questions which concern the lives of individual men and women, with sentiments, hopes, and aspirations.

[Illustration:  FREDERIC BASTIAT]

He was born at Bayonne in France, June 19th, 1801.  At nine years of age he was left an orphan, but he was cared for by his grandfather and aunt.  He received his schooling at the college of St. Sever and at Soreze, where he was noted as a diligent student.  When about twenty years of age he was taken into the commercial house of his uncle at Bayonne.  His leisure was employed in cultivating art and literature, and he became accomplished in languages and in instrumental and vocal music.  He was early interested in political