“I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over there,” Mr. Searle mentioned; “but had scarcely followed it more than you pretend to pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree may drop, on the other side of your wall, in your neighbour’s garden. There was a man I knew at Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a decent fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I think he afterwards went to the Middle States. They’ll be, I suppose, about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make one fancy he _did_ get there and that you’ve kept him alive by one of those beastly processes--I think you have ‘em over there: what do you call it, ‘putting up’ things? If you’re he you’ve not done a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There’s a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one to whom he did a wrong.” “Oh mercy _on_ us!” cried Miss Searle in simple horror. “Of course _you_ know nothing of such things,” he rather dryly allowed. “You’re too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts.” “I’m sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost,” said my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes. “Why does it sob? I feel as if that were what we’ve come above all to learn.” Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment gaugingly; he held the balance as to measure his resources. He wished to do justice to his theme. With the long finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass and his conscious eyes betraying that, small and strange as he sat there, he knew himself, to his pleasure and advantage, remarkably impressive, he dropped into our untutored minds the sombre legend of his house. “Mr. Clement Searle, from all I gather, was a young man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the elder and the more promising. She educated him with the greatest affection and care. Of course when he came to manhood she wished him to marry well. His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook the want of money in his wife; and Mrs. Searle selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived, every good gift save a fortune--a fine proud handsome girl, the daughter of an old friend, an old lover I suspect, of her own. Clement, however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as yet unprepared to choose. The young lady opened upon him in vain the battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her cause. Clement remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs. Searle had a character which appears to have gone out of fashion in my family nowadays; she was a great manager, a _maîtresse-femme_. A proud passionate imperious woman, she had had immense cares and ever so many law-suits; they had sharpened