We think more highly of ourselves than we admit, and allow ourselves to smile when we walk in to dinner behind the new nobility.

We grow just a little richer with every decade, and add a field or two to our domains once in five years.

The gaps made by falling rents we have filled by judicious purchases of land near rising towns; and we have no doubt that there lies before us a future as long and prosperous as our past has been.

We are not universally popular, and we see in the fact a tribute to our valuable qualities.
I venture to mention these family virtues and characteristics because it has been thought in some quarters that I displayed them but to a very slight degree in the course of the expedition on which I was now embarked.
The impression is a mistaken one.

As I have said before, I did nothing that was not forced upon me.