Now let it be lawful to take that subject first.
Fair Robin, though not at all anxious for fame, but modestly willing to decline it, had not been successful--though he worked so much by night--in preserving sweet obscurity.

His character was public, and set on high by fortune, to be gazed at from wholly different points of view.
From their narrow and lime-eyed outlook the coast-guard beheld in him the latest incarnation of Old Nick; yet they hated him only in an abstract manner, and as men feel toward that evil one.

Magistrates also, and the large protective powers, were arrayed against him, yet happy to abstain from laying hands, when their hands were their own, upon him.
And many of the farmers, who should have been his warmest friends and best customers, were now so attached to their king and country, by bellicose warmth and army contracts, that instead of a guinea for a four-gallon anker, they would offer three crowns, or the exciseman.
And not only conscience, but short cash, after three bad harvests, constrained them.
Yet the staple of public opinion was sound, as it must be where women predominate.

The best of women could not see why they should not have anything they wanted for less than it cost the maker.

To gaze at a sister woman better dressed at half the money was simply to abjure every lofty principle.