“I’m coming, father!—It never can be Henry yet. The postman’s bell is but just gone by, and the six o’clock cries are not all over; and there sound the chimes. It is full five minutes’ walk from Lad-lane, too. Perhaps there is something more to be done at the books: so I will carry down my apron.—Why, Morgan, it is well I did not throw you down stairs.” Morgan’s face, entrenched in its mob cap, was just visible in the twilight, peeping into the room from the steep, narrow stair upon which the chamber-door directly opened. She came to say that her master wanted Miss Jane; that he was in a great hurry, and seemed to have some good news to tell. Mr. Farrer was bustling about, apparently in a state of great happiness. His brown wig seemed to sit lightly on his crown; his shoes creaked very actively; his half whistle betokened a light heart, and he poked the fire as if he had forgotten how much coals were a bushel. He stretched out his arms when his daughter came down with a look of inquiry, and kissed her on either cheek, saying, “I have news for thee, my dear. I say, Morgan, let us have plenty of buttered toast,—plenty and hot. Well, Jenny,—life is short enough to some folks. Of all people, who do you think are dead?” Jane saw that it was nobody that she would be expected to grieve about. She had fallen enough into her father’s way of thinking to conjecture aright,—that some of the lot of lives with which her father and she were joined in a tontine annuity had failed. “Poor souls! Yes: Jerry Hill and his brother,—both gone together of a fever, in the same house. Who would have thought it? Both younger lives than mine, by some years. I have no doubt they thought, many a time, that mine would be the first to fail. But this is a fine invention,—this way of purchasing annuities,—though I was against it at first, as being too much like a lottery for a sober man to venture upon. But, I say, Jane, I hope you are glad I made you invest your money in this way. You had a right to look to coming into their lives, sooner or later; but one would hardly have expected it in my time; though, somehow, I always had a notion it would turn out so.” Jane’s colour had been much raised, from the first disclosure of the news. She now asked whether these were not the last lives of the lot, out of their own family;—whether her father’s, her brother Michael’s, and her own were not the only ones now left. “To be sure they are! We have the whole thing to ourselves from this time. I think the minister will be for sending Michael and me to the wars, to have us killed off; though I hope, in that case, you would live on and on, and enjoy your own for many a year, to disappoint him. But, to be sure,” said the old man, checking his exultation as he saw his daughter look grave, “life is a very uncertain thing, as we may see by what has just happened.” “I am sure it is the last thing I thought of,” observed Jane.