positively unanimous in not rising, I thought I could not do better than to sit down on the bank and indulge in a quiet chat with Richard. He had evidently something on his mind, and all bearing on a subject in which I was really interested, having heard a little before. I was, therefore, glad to be a patient listener while he supplied the missing links, and enabled me to make out the following connected story.

It soon appeared, that all the quarrelling to which he alluded was about two little babestwo poor, helpless, little infants-most helpless, most powerless to look at, but yet so mighty in the eye of the law that they even were powerful enough effectually to divert a stream of wealth from the family of their uncle, General Colton,bidding timber to grow and rents accumulate for twenty-one years, till the elder or the survivor of the babes aforesaid should have attained to the years at which discretion is supposed by courtesy at all times to make its appearance.

Indeed" 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange, for the unprofessional mind to think of, but there lay two little innocents in their cradle—still, whether sleeping or waking, they were guarded, not only by the yearning of a devoted mother, but by the inviolable majesty of the law of England, as administered by the great Lord

THINGS VERY PROVOKING.

5

Chancellor, who-rather than one tittle of their remotest right should fail-would have their cause pleaded before him by one learned counsellor duly instructed for each of them, and would himself sit, day after day, with a knotty question, just as patient and as scrupulous as if he were adjudicating for the highest and the noblest suitor in the land.

The appearance of these two babes, expected little and wanted less, proved a very sore disappointment to General Colton.-So very near had the General been to the summit of his ambition in realising the comfortable independence, as well the county influence of Richcourt Manor, yet, after all, had missed it!

Who has not, at one moment of his life, grasped in his sanguine imagination some envied boon-measured it, and calculated it-even laid his plans and made up his mind what he should do with it, till at last his ideas have already enlarged and swelled to the full measure of the desired possession, but, dashed from the pinnacle of all his hopes, has been compelled to fall back upon his own far humbler state of things a state actually shrivelled, shrunken, and insipid from the contrast?

Yes, there was one commanding spot and summer-house, with round thatched roof, called

Belvidere, and there Richard had often espied the General, as he called it, "a regularly taking of stock." For, Richard always fancied he could read the inmost thoughts of the General as, in his sanguine imagination, he cut down timber, formed ornamental water, planted out eye-sores, and disclosed new views, with the same lively interest as if he were already the proprietor of Richcourt Manor.

But Richard Wyatt wanted no such master as General Colton; and Richard's likes and dislikes, Richard's sympathies and antipathies, were not hard to read; especially when he returned to the General very short answers to many a question which seemed, in Richard's homely phrase, "a making free with what wasn't his'n," and too much like "reckoning the chickens before they were hatched."

But we left the two master Walfords lying in the cradle. But how they came there, and how the fortune of one, at least, of these little innocents was made before he was born, with all the advantages of having the rutty road of life made smooth and easy, and the hard work ready done, with everything as soft and comfortable as can be at the outset, so as to promise a pleasant life-long journey-all this shall be the subject of the following pages.

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CHAPTER II.

SHOWING WHERE ALL THE MONEY COMES FROM.

Ir is wonderful what a wealthy old gentleman John Bull is. If we calculate even the money that he is robbed of, and the leakage of his pockets, it is equal to the revenue of a petty state. Fifty millions a-year he loses by bad debts in bankruptcy, and as much more, in some years, in foreign loans and bubble companies. In Liverpool alone he loses more than half a million a-year by pickpockets and other thieves; besides many other proofs, it were easy to point out as the shipwrecked mariner said when he espied a gallows-of a well-to-do and of a well-ordered and flourishing establishment.

But the question is, Where does all the money come from? How is it that the enterprising family of John Bull contrive to get together so much more money than they know what to do with?

It all proceeds from such patient and persevering members as Thomas Walford; men who begin life very painstaking, and end life very avaricious. First of all, they make money that they may live; and, last of all, they live only that they may make money; and go on, simply from the force or impetus of habit, striving, saving, paring and scraping, for the mere pleasure of adding cipher to cipher, and parchment to parchment; oftentimes with as little real use or enjoyment of their hard-earned riches, as if they were dotting down and mapping so many acres of the sky!

However exaggerated a picture this may be of some rich men, it was true to the life of Thomas Walford; it is equally true of many another soulless and office-dried specimen of humanity at the present day.

Thomas Walford began the world with nothing; and since he never saved a penny, of which he did not at the same time learn the value, from the hard labour and self-denial required to earn it-he commenced by laying, stone by stone, a very sure foundation for his future fortune.

Thomas Walford began the world as a clerk in the office of Messrs. Catcham and Keepham, who were called "general merchants; "— a kind