A story of a successful man's life might have been written about this first Mortomley, who, forsaking the paths hitherto trodden by his progenitors, struck out one for himself which led to fortune and domestic happiness. He married a daughter of Philip Gyson, a maiden fair, discreet, young and well-dowered. When evil days came to the old man, his father, he succoured him as Joseph succoured Jacob. When famine, sore and sudden, fell upon the Mortomleys, in Leicestershire, he bade his brothers and his sisters welcome to sit at his board, and share of the plenty which had fallen to his lot in the strange land of Cockaigne. He helped the males of his family to wend their way to foreign lands as the humour seized them; the females married or died. He buried his father in a vault he built for the purpose in Hackney old church-yard,--and when his own time came, he was laid beside him, and his son succeeded him. This son was not the Archibald mentioned in the preceding chapter as connected with an unpleasant occurrence in Mr. Asherill's experience, but a Mortomley christened Hill--the name to which his father's somewhat lengthy cognomen had been judiciously abbreviated--who worked even harder at the colour trade than his father had done, and who, when he died, left behind him not merely the original little factory enlarged, but a new and extensive works, situate on the north bank of the Thames, between what is now called the Regent's Canal and the then unbuilt West India Docks. Further, during his reign the old city warehouse in Thames Street,--where Philip Gyson carried on his business and lived when in town, and not at his country seat in the delightful village of Hackney, famous in his day for the salubrity of its air, and a favourite resort of city merchants and their families,--was enlarged and altered so as to suit the requirements of his extending business. Much more he might have done, but that in his prime he caught a cold which turned to a fever that ended in his being carried likewise to the family vault at Hackney. Out of many children only one son remained, Archibald, and with him began, not the downfall of the business edifice, but the commencement of that dead level of successful trading which indicates surely that the table land is reached, and the next incline will have to be trodden down, not up. A man who found and maintained a most lucrative business, who was content to leave things as he found them, to do all the good he could in life, whose delight it was to make other people happy, who, excepting theoretically, had no faith whatever in original sin, and who, thanks to those who had gone before, never found himself in a serious embarrassment or difficulty from the time he entered man's estate till his turn came to take possession of that other property which Adam with strict impartiality left a share of to all his descendants for ever.