Mr. Culpepper gazed after them awhile, and then turned towards Colonel Brigham, with a sardonic laugh on his face. "Well, well," said he, "they are right. It is refreshing to see them for once acting naturally. It was, perhaps, expecting too much, even of them, to suppose they would sit still and listen to all I was likely to say, for they know me well. Yet, if they had not read my will, they would not have dared to quit the room when I ordered them to remain." He then proceeded to relate that he was a native of Quebec, where, in early life, he had long been engaged in a very profitable commercial business, and had been left a widower at the age of forty. A few years afterwards, he married again. His second wife was a lady of large fortune, which she made over to him, on condition that he should take her family name of Culpepper. The Mr. Lambleys were the nephews of his wife, being the children of her younger sister. On the death of their parents, he was induced by her to give them a home in his house. The four Lambleys had very little property of their own, their father having dissipated nearly all that he had acquired by his marriage. They had been educated for professions, in which it was soon found that they had neither the ability nor the perseverance to succeed; their whole souls seeming concentrated to one point, that of gaining the favour of their uncle (who lost his second wife a few years after their marriage), and with this object they vied with each other in a course of unremitting and untiring servilities, foolishly supposing it the only way to accomplish their aim of eventually becoming his heirs. All that they gained beyond the payment of their current expenses, was Mr. Culpepper's unqualified contempt. He made a secret resolution to revenge himself on their duplicity, and to disappoint their mercenary views by playing them a trick at the last, and he had a will drawn up, in which he devised his whole property to the establishment of a hospital. This will he always carried about with him in the red morocco box. He had come to the United States on a tour for the benefit of his health, and also to satisfy himself as to the truth of all he had heard respecting the unparalleled improvement of the country since it had thrown off the yoke which his fellow-subjects of Canada were still satisfied to wear. "And now," continued Mr. Culpepper to his landlord, "you have not seen all that is in the red box. I know not by what presentiment I am impelled; but, short as our acquaintance has been, I cannot resist an unaccountable inclination to speak more openly of my private affairs to you, Colonel Brigham, than to any person I have ever met with. I feel persuaded that I shall find no cause to regret having done so. It is a long time since I have had any one near me to whom I could talk confidentially." And he added, with a sigh: "I fear that I may say with Shakspeare's Richard, 'there is no creature loves me.'"