say that it was he above all who urged the step upon old Mr. Brownlow. Persons who professed to know, even asserted that the elder son, in his generosity, had quite a struggle with his father, and that his argument was always “for my mother’s sake.” If this, was true, it was all the more generous of him, because his mother was well known to have thought nothing of John in comparison with the handsome Arthur, whom she spoiled as long as she lived. Anyhow, the result was that John inherited the house and the business, the furniture and old crystal and silver, and a very comfortable income, but nothing that could be called a fortune, or that would in any way have justified him in launching out into a more expensive description of life. At this time he was thirty at least, and not of a speculative turn of mind; and when old Mrs. Thomson’s will--a will not even drawn up in his office, which would have been a kind of preparation--was read to him, it is said that he lost his temper on the occasion, and used very unbecoming language to the poor woman in her coffin. What had he to do with the old hag? “What did she mean by bothering him with her filthy money?” he said, and did not show at all the frame of mind that might have been expected under the circumstances. Mrs. Thomson was an old woman, who had lived in a very miserly sort of way, with an old servant, in a little house in the outskirts of the town. Nobody could ever tell what attracted her toward John Brownlow, who never, as he himself said, had any thing to do with her; and she had relations of her own in Masterton--the Fennells--who always knew she had money, and counted upon being her heirs. But they were distant relations, and perhaps they did not know all her story. What petrified the town, however, was, when it was found out that old Mrs. Thomson had left a fortune, not of a few hundreds, as people supposed, but of more than fifty thousand pounds, behind her, and that it was all left in a way to John Brownlow. It was left to him in trust for Mrs. Thomson’s daughter Phœbe, a person whose existence no one in Masterton had ever dreamed of, but who, it appeared had married a common soldier, and gone off with him ages before, and had been cursed and cast off by her hard-hearted mother. That was long, long ago, and perhaps the solitary old creature’s heart, if she had a heart, had relented to her only child; perhaps, as John Brownlow thought, it was a mere suggestion of Satan to trouble and annoy him, a man who had nothing to do with Phœbe Thomson. Anyhow, this was the substance of the will. The money was all left to John Brownlow in trust for this woman, who had gone nobody knew where, and whose very name by marriage her mother did not state, and nobody could tell. If Phœbe Thomson did not make her appearance within the next twenty-five years, then the money was to pass to John Brownlow and his heirs in perpetuity beyond all power of reclamation. This was the strange event