Crump, a card-playing spinster resident at Bath. I came next, since it was presumed that Aunt Letty, fifty-two at the time of Mr Crump's death, would never marry, nor, five years later, would her marriage have materially affected my prospects. After myself, and should I, too, die child-monly much to the taste of a genuine countryman less, the six hundred a year reverted to a distant relation in Wales, a curate with a large family. I, Morris Warburton, being twenty-four, and in perfect health, and my aunt being thirty-three years older, my life-interest was of course saleable.

'A leetle speculative, of course,' said the steady, parchment-cheeked lawyer-Mr Docket it was, of Docket, Drafter, and Ferret, in Rolls Buildings, to whom I had gone at this pinch-' but property, my dear sir, property. It so happens that we have a client, formerly engaged in extensive mercantile transactions in South America, who sometimes invests loose capital in such securities as those which you have to offer, and he was inquiring for something of the sort so lately as last week. Could you make it convenient to look in to-morrow; no, next day, at three o'clock, and be introduced to Mr Touchet?'

Universal Credit Company, a tremendous concern, to the fortunes of which many little banks like ours were attached like cock boats to a stately argosy ; but I did not like to refuse, and I went. Suburban, or quasi-suburban villas are not comlike myself, although I acknowledge their good points-the smooth roads, well kept, watered, and gas-lit, patrolled by police, and bordered by neatly trimmed hedges, that inclose ultra-green meadows, with prize cows condescendingly cropping the grass. I own that the gardens are ablaze with flowers and luscious with fruit, that there are acres of conservatory and melon-frame, that the lawns are of unruffled velvet, and the houses as resplendent as spotless stucco and burnished plateglass windows can make them. But still, as a rule, I do not feel myself at home amid these urban ruralities. The Hollies impressed me more favourably than most of its compeers. It was, in part at least, an old house, built when Dorking was considered as really a country town, cut off from the metropolis by highwaymen-haunted commons and leafy lanes; and there were old trees and dense shrubs, and mellow red walls, where the peaches clung lovingly to the worm-eaten trelliswork. The gardens were large and well stocked; and there were eighty or ninety acres of land, which Mr Touchet grandiloquently called the Home Farm, and on which he spent more, I suspect, than he would have cared to acknowledge.

Indeed, my entertainer, who in London was the keen, suspicious, restless man of business whom we so often see, underwent a notable change when he came down to the tiny estate that his gains had enabled him to purchase. At the Hollies, he discarded his black coat for a loose velveteen shootingjacket with a dog-whistle hanging to the topmost button-hole, wore gaiters, thick boots, and a wideawake hat, and did his best to play the uncongenial part of a country squire. It was a grand spectacle,

I did look in at three o'clock on the day specified, and I was formally introduced to Mr Touchet. A little, dry, sallow-featured man was this latter, with a small, restless pair of eyes, pale in colour, and distrustful as to expression, which very much reminded me of that of an elephant. He was dressed in rusty black, his neck-tie was white, but crumpled and ill arranged, and he had a frill to the bosom of his shirt, in which was stuck a great emerald brooch, while he had heavy rings on his fingers. The fingers were clean enough, though, which those of your Houndsditch or Minories capitalist seldom are, and indeed Mr Touchet, well washed and well brushed, but quaint of garb and manner, was evidently the eccentric wealthy old bachelor that the solicitor had described him to be. Docket, Drafter, and Ferret had been my great-to see him tasting samples of corn on a market-day, uncle's lawyers, and had copies of his will and the other necessary documents ready for inspection; and since buyer and seller were both clients, much valuable time was saved. But there were some difficulties as to price; and I had three or four interviews with Mr Touchet, sometimes at his office in Baytree Court, City, and sometimes in Rolls Buildings. At last, after much discussion, an agreement was arrived at. I was to receive two thousand six hundred pounds; and my life-interest in Aunt Letty's six hundred a year was to be made over to Caleb Carnagrew Touchet, Esq. (people who lend money, or deal in it, seem to possess a speciality for the very oddest of Christian names), of the Hollies, Dorking, in the county of Surrey. While the papers were being drawn out in all the pomp and ceremony of clerkly copper-plate and legal verbiage, Mr Touchet, who had now grown very friendly, invited me to spend a few days at his Dorking villa with the arboricultural appellation. It was-such was its owner's modest commendation-a 'neat little box.' He, its lord, could give me some shooting, on a small scale, of course; and Dorking had the additional merit of being so closely linked to London by the iron road, that I could attend to business just as well from there as if I continued to occupy my Baker Street lodgings. I was certainly not in high spirits, for I had serious doubts as to the stability of the

or chatting about crops to cynical rustics, or super-
intending the feeding of his two or three broods of
young pheasants, or going about the grounds with
half-a-dozen dogs, utterly indifferent to his voice
and whistle, or to the cracking of his whip. In-
deed, the dogs and the people had found out the
soft side of his nature, the hard side of which was
alone visible among his business connections in
London. His labourers did as little work as they
chose at fancy wages. His cattle and horses were
overfed. His gardens produced fruit and flowers
at a cost far exceeding their net value at the
dearest West End shops, and his pensioners were
legion. For, to do him justice, the ex-merchant
had vigorously taken up that best and most gracious
part of a squire's duty, which consists in caring for
the wants of his poor neighbours, and the distribu-
tion of flannel, soup, and coals was liberal indeed;
while many a jelly or other delicacy, and many a
basketful of choice grapes, found its way from the
Hollies to the bedside of some village invalid who
craved for daintier food than the usual
of the cottage.

spare

diet

Mr Touchet was, as I have said, a bachelor. His sister, Miss Barbara, who was older than he was, and taller, but very like him in face and figure, kept house for him; while under his roof resided his orphan niece, whose father and mother had both died in South America. And Miss Palmer

'Mr Touchet,' I said, interrupting him, 'a young man should bear much from an old one, and especially from his host of two hours since, but not everything. I can excuse your impatience, your anger even, but you must not do me wilful injustice. I was guided by no such sordid movements as your words impute, when I learned to love your niece. I would marry her to-morrow, were I but rich enough to offer her a home worthy of her, were you reduced to poverty fivefold greater than that with which you now taunt me. As it is, although I believe that my affection for your niece is reciprocated, I have forborne to entangle Miss Palmer's trustful and tender nature in the meshes of what must in any case prove a long, and may but too probably be a hopeless engagement. I have restrained myself from asking her for any pledge.' 'Very kind of you!' snorted out Mr Touchet, looking penknives at me.

feeling, spread through the county when it was known that the good old house of Crump and Warburton could no longer face the storms of the modern commercial world, but had closed its doors, and avowed itself insolvent. Many pitied us—I speak of the firm, from habit, in its old corporate character-and those who blamed were not spiteful in their censure. It was rumoured from the first that we should pay a large dividend'; and our involuntary errors seemed trifling when compared with the staring sins of that huge, brazen impostor, the Universal Credit, which had dragged down in its merited fall a hundred tributaries. Still, it was painful to be the subject of comments in the local newspapers, of the rude wit of street-boys, who chalked doggerel sonnets on our lately respectable door, and of the condolence of neighbours vain of their superior wisdom.

'Now, Mr Warburton, how lucky that you were not in time to embark that two thousand six hundred, the price of your reversion, in the poor old business,' said Mr Pritchard, pushing up his spectacles, and rubbing his forehead with his short forefinger. A day earlier, and the mischief would have been done. As it is, you have something in hand with which to begin life anew.'

'I must begin it as an honest man, old friend, or not at all,' I answered. I consider that sum to be as answerable for the bank's debts as if I had found it in the bank till. If only we can give each creditor his due, I shall not care much that I have to earn my bread for the future before I can eat it.' On which Pritchard first called his employer a foolish lad, and then shook hands with me, and began to cry.

Before we parted, however, I had succeeded in bringing the old man to a more reasonable state of mind; and he at last admitted that, personally speaking, he should not have had the slightest objection to become my uncle by marriage. It was the money question that interposed a fatal, impassable barrier between Alice and me. That my small provincial bank, damaged and leaky, should at best do more than humbly pay its way, and yield a bare maintenance, was most unlikely; while men like Mr Touchet prize too highly the gold for which they have toiled and At first, the most sanguine of the newsmongers plotted to allow it lightly to slip from their grasp. had thought and said that Crump and Warburton He told me frankly that he was a 'warm' man, would pay twelve-and-sixpence as a dividend. better off, perhaps, than I guessed, and that Alice Then the rumour ranged to six half-crowns, and would come into every sixpence of his hoards, on next to nineteen shillings. But when it was pubthe one condition of her marrying to his satisfac- licly announced that the old bank would pay no tion. Not, mind you, that I'd have her buckled less than twenty shillings in the pound, and that for life to a chap she did not fancy, or who would this desirable result had been brought about by not treat her well, but girls of her age change the deliberate sacrifice of the proprietor's private their minds easily; and she, with her accomplish-means, there was only too much of local enthu ments, sir, and education, and looks, and prospects -a sprig of nobility is what she should look for, or else a substantial man. Now, good luck to you, and get this silly dream out of your head as early as possible.'

siasm expressed at what was after all but an act of common honesty. Some of the depositors were loath and ashamed to take back their cash in full, and wanted to leave a balance in our hands, and certain country firms begged to keep their accounts with us open. It was a compliment, certainly, when the London Provincial Bank, an association far older and more solid than the blatant impostor that had crushed us beneath its ruins, offered the magic wand of its gold-compelling credit to set Crump and Warburton up again. But banking with borrowed capital was not to my taste, and the well-meant proffer was civilly declined. No, we had failed; but we could say more truly than Francis I. that all was lost but honour."'. That "The Universal Credit Company has stopped remained to us the surliest farmer, the most payment. Hopeless smash. Not expected-so pinched and pinching of widows, the most distrustRound and Ransom write me word-to pay a half-ful of rural tradesmen, could not say that he or crown dividend in the pound. They discounted she had lost a farthing by the collapse of the old those last acceptances of ours that the manager house. promised to hold over. Round and Ransom have them, and press for immediate reimbursement,' gasped out the old cashier breathlessly.

I travelled down to Dullingham without paying much more attention to the familiar scenery than a somnambulist might have done, for my heart was heavy, and my brain torpid. When I reached the bank, I found Pritchard, whom I had forewarned of my arrival, awaiting me at the door.

'You haven't heard the news?' he cried breathlessly.

News! what news?' I asked, with a little reviving curiosity.

"That is the death-blow,' said I. And we did put up the shutters.

Some dismay, and somewhat of a compassionate

'But what are you to live on, Master Morris?' was Mr Pritchard's anxious inquiry. His own annuity, or rather his bundle of tiny annuities, purchased from time to time with the savings of his self-denying life, would suffice to maintain one, but not two-or else I verily believe that the

faithful old clerk would have volunteered to share his crust with his hereditary ex-employer.

'On my earnings, I suppose,' I answered as cheerily as I could. It is no great hardship, after all, for a strong young fellow like myself to be dependent on his own exertions for his dinner. When all is paid, there will be a little money left. I can look out for an opening, and'

'Please, sir, here's the message-and here's the receipt,' said a smart urchin in the uniform of the telegraph messengers, whom Kezia, the red-headed maid-of-all-work, had shewn into the room. I signed the receipt, and dismissed the delicate Ariel of the electric wire; but it was not until some minutes afterwards, and with a dulled curiosity, that I broke open the official envelope.

The telegram was from Starchey, my aunt's invaluable maid. Aunt Letitia had died suddenly, immediately on returning from a whist-party at the house of one of her old friends, Mrs Admiral Buntline, in Milsom Crescent. She had uttered but one or two articulate phrases after the fatal seizure, one of which consisted of the ambiguous word 'revoke,' while the others, 'odd trick,' and 'trumping your partner's best suit,' had clearly reference to the game of which she had so long been a votary. Dead she was, however, and the distracted Starchey had addressed me (at great length, for the message was of lavish proportions), as the nearest surviving relative of her late mistress.

Well, we buried poor Aunt Letty decently. She had left about as much money in her desk and in her banker's hands as carried out the provisions of her will, for paying her funeral expenses, and leaving Starchey with new mourning, forty-nine Sovereigns, a wardrobe of old-fashioned tabbinets and brocades, two India shawls, a set of green ivory chessmen, and thirty-two volumes of sermons. That I regretted the old lady much, I cannot say. She had never liked me, having an instinctive antipathy to boys, and I well remembered her tart reproofs, and the hard tap, tapping of her thimbleshod finger when I was very little. But she was the last of my known relatives, and I grieved for her, though not very acutely.

Aunt

would do no good with it, though a working-man with savings might. Big capitalists-not the small fry-and stout-limbed, hard-headed, sober labourers, thrive in a colony. Have the courage to be the last of these two, and who knows if you may not some day develop into the first!'

I thanked Mr Touchet for his advice, and we parted. Our interview had been one of painful restraint in one respect at least, since I had not ventured to ask news of Alice, and he, though polite and even cordial, had been significantly silent as to the female members of his family. One word more,' said the ex-merchant as we shook hands, and it is worth listening to, from an old man who has spent the best years of his life in tough work under a furnace-heat: don't be too bookish when you get out there. The white-fisted gentlemen who write a good hand, and know languages dead and living, are just so much live lumber, where an English cheap-Jack would thrive, and a mud-lark make a living. Remember, that in a new country the true Tom Tiddler's Ground, the place where fortunes are picked up, lies always in the open air-not in wharfside offices and stores, where a sorry imitation of Europe is maintained.'

But as we mortals must take what lies within our reach, and as an old friend of my father's was able to recommend me to a wool-dealer in Buenos Ayres, while I had no sort of introduction to any other colony, my choice was soon made. To make the long voyage to South America with a desk and a stool in a counting-house as the goal of the expedition, might not at first sight appear very exhilarating, but I was thankful to have done with shams and make-believes, and to brace myself for sound, hard work in a new sphere of activity. "You'll find old Pinson-he is a Frenchman, who always boasts, after dinner, that he came into Rouen a barefooted boy, to seek work in any mill or warehouse, and that now he owns houses and rentes in Paris-a good fellow in his way. If you please him, he'll give you a chance of fortune; if not, he'll screw the value of every centime of salary, and more, out of you in the shape of incessant drudgery, but the salary will be forthcoming on pay-day, even then. I don't think you can do better,' said my introducer.

Nor did I. So, buying what was necessary, I took my passage in the fine, fast-sailing screw steam-packet Bolivar, and left England with few, indeed, to shake me by the hand at parting. Perhaps, ere I returned, should I ever do so, Alice would be married and settled. Who could tell what was to be!

TESTAMENTARY CURIOSITIES.

Mr Touchet, whom I saw in London immediately after this event, was almost restored to his ancient cordiality in his intercourse with myself, so intensely did he hug himself in exultation at his superior cleverness in making the bargain concerning the reversionary interest. It is true that neither he nor any other man could reasonably have calculated on my unlucky aunt's being carried off by a fit of 'perplexity,' according to the dictum of her maid. But every one likes to win, and the rapidity with which his investment had begun to fructify put him into great good-humour. Letty's six hundred a year was his own now, and he WHEN Sheridan, in an angry fit, vowed he would could afford to bestow a kind thought on the poor cut his son off with a shilling, the imperturbable fellow left out in the cold. 'Well, you can't do Tom quietly inquired: Where will you get it, better than emigrate,' he said, when I had given sir?' Sheridan's threat would come naturally to him an outline of my plans, such as they were, in a comedy-writer, 'I'll cut you off with a shilling, answer to his inquiry. And mind you,' pursued sir!' being a sentence familiar in the mouths of the old bachelor in a more earnest manner than fathers in that gas-lighted world, which exists only before, I am not one of those who bawl out the between the hours of seven and eleven P.M.-a word emigration as if it were a patent medicine world wherein, by some mysterious but inexorable warranted to cure all complaints. Your money-law, every well-to-do old gentleman is plagued with didn't you say it would be under two hundred a rebellious son or troublesome nephew, who will pounds?-goes for nothing beyond kit, and passage, fall in love with the wrong young woman. Upon and expenses while you look about you. And if the stage, elderly resentment is ever short-lived. you had a small capital-a few hundreds-you | Outside it, old hearts are not always so easily