I hate law details as cordially as my readers can, and therefore I shall content myself with stating that Mr Pike's management, at the end, not of three days, but of two weeks, was so admirable that Uncle Jack was drawn out of prison, and my father extracted from all his liabilities, by a sum two-thirds less than was first startlingly submitted to our indignant horror--and that, too, in a manner that would have satisfied the conscience of the most punctilious formalist, whose contribution to the national fund, for an omitted payment to the Income Tax. the Chancellor of the Exchequer ever had the honour to acknowledge. Still the sum was very large in proportion to my poor father's income; and what with Jack's debts, the claims of the Anti-Publisher Society's printer--including the very expensive plates that had been so lavishly bespoken, and in great part completed, for the _History of Human Error_--and, above all, the liabilities incurred on _The Capitalist_; what with the _plant_, as Mr Peck technically phrased a great upas-tree of a total, branching out into types, cases, printing-presses, engines, &c., all now to be resold at a third of their value; what with advertisements and bills, that had covered all the dead walls by which rubbish might be shot, throughout the three kingdoms; what with the dues of reporters, and salaries of writers, who had been engaged for a year at least to _The Capitalist_, and whose claims survived the wretch they had killed and buried; what, in short, with all that the combined ingenuity of Uncle Jack and printer Peck could supply for the utter ruin of the Caxton family--even after all deductions, curtailments, and after all that one could extract in the way of just contribution from the least unsubstantial of those shadows called the shareholders--my father's fortune was reduced to little more than £8000, which being placed at mortgage, at 4 per cent, yielded just £372, 10s. a-year--enough for my father to live upon, but not enough to afford also his son Pisistratus the advantages of education at Trinity College, Cambridge. The blow fell rather upon me than my father, and my young shoulders bore it without much wincing. This settled, to our universal satisfaction, I went to pay my farewell visit to Sir Sedley Beaudesert. He had made much of me, during my stay in London. I had breakfasted and dined with him pretty often; I had presented Squills to him, who no sooner set eyes upon that splendid conformation, than he described his character with the nicest accuracy as the necessary consequence of such a development for the rosy pleasures of life, and whose philosophy delighted and consoled Sir Sedley. We had never once retouched on the subject of Fanny's marriage, and both of us tacitly avoided even mentioning the Trevanions. But in this last visit, though he maintained the same reserve as to Fanny, he referred without scruple to her father.