Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not perhaps far to seek. If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings sooner or later the weakness of age. That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one eminently utilitarian,--because with every condition of existence changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,--because with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with them. Like his progenitors, without a doubt of failure, he, full of generous impulses and philanthropic feeling, started on his business journey, and behold, he fell among thieves. The stage at which he had therefore arrived when we make his acquaintance was something a hundred times worse than bankruptcy--a thousand times worse than friendly liquidation by arrangement. Coolly those about him, with his most innocent concurrence, handed the cards which dropped from his feeble fingers to his worst enemies, who, under the guise of friendship, undertook to play out the game for him, and played it as we shall see. About a century ago there came up to London the younger son of a Leicestershire squire, who, having quarrelled with his father, thought he would see whether the great metropolis might not prove a more genial parent. He came up with some money, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and that certain quantity of brains which Heaven, since the time of Jacob, usually inclines, no doubt for good and equitable reasons, to bestow on the junior members of a family. In London he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a certain Philip Gyson, whose ancestors had long and honourably been connected with the city, and who was about to start a colour works in the then rural village of Hackney. Into this works Hildebrand Mortomley--his family had not then lost either the names or the traditions of those who, having fought on the losing side for King and Crown, were loyal spite of royal ingratitude, when the King came to his own again--threw himself, his money, his energy, and his genius. For he had genius. First of all he set himself to master his trade. When he had mastered it, he at once began to reject its crude old-fashioned formulæ, and invent, and simplify, and improve for himself.