A young physician, clever, handsome, gay, in a small town in Hampshire, Miss Mitford’s father won the hand of an heiress with a property of eight-and-twenty thousand pounds. With the exception of two hundred a year, settled on her as pin-money, the whole of this fortune was injudiciously placed at the free use of Dr. Mitford, who seems to have possessed every quality to make his wife happy—except prudence. Being an eager Whig, he plunged into election politics and made enemies; being very hospitable, he spent more money than he could afford; and, endeavoring to retrieve the waste by cards and speculation, he sank nearly the whole of his resources. In this extremity, he thought he would do better in a fresh place, and so the family removed to Lyme Regis, where they had a fine house, which twenty years before had been rented by the great Lord Chatham for the use of his sons. Here they led a very gay life for two or three seasons—balls, excursions, dinners; yet in the midst of it, Miss Mitford says, she felt a secret conviction that something was wrong—“such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink while the weather is still bright and clear.” Her father went ominously to London, and lost more money—she does not say how—all was now gone except the pin-money: friends departed one by one, and there was great hurry and confusion, and then everything was to be parted with, and everybody to be paid, and the family made a forced journey to London, part of which was performed in a tilted cart without springs, for lack of better conveyance. Settled in a dingy, comfortless lodging in one of the suburbs beyond Westminster Bridge, Dr. Mitford’s constitutional vivacity returned. He used to take his little girl, then ten years old, in his hand about town to show her the sights; and one day they stopped at an Irish lottery-office, and showing her certain mysterious bits of paper with numbers on them, he desired her to choose one. She selected No. 2,224; but as this was only a quarter, and papa wanted to purchase a whole ticket, he desired her to choose again. But her heart was set on No. 2,224, because the numbers added together made up ten, and that day happened to be her tenth birth-day. Fortunately, the lottery-office man had the whole number in shares, and so the ticket was bought. She must relate the sequel in her own words. “The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds, just like Almaschar over his basket of eggs. “Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning we were all preparing to go to church, when a face that I had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good news.