Just as Mr. Pillbody was making arrangements to bring these mines before the public, his stockbroking friend, through whom he had effected the purchase, left for Europe, and it was then discovered that Mr. Pillbody's mines, if they existed at all, were ten feet under a swamp, on property which belonged to somebody else, the title deeds of which had been forged by the adroit operator. Mr. Pillbody could not endure his misfortune. He wrote notes bidding farewell to his wife and child, and commending them to the care of their relatives, to whom he had always been bountifully generous. Then he went to Staten Island by ferry, there took a row boat, proceeded to a celebrated oyster bed which was the scene of his youthful labors, and drowned himself. The widow and daughter (the latter twenty years of age, healthy, and finely educated) applied to the two brothers of the deceased for assistance, and were at once kindly received into their families, and sat upon sofas and ate from tables purchased with money (never repaid) of the late Mr. Pillbody. The two brothers, upon application to the proper tribunal, were appointed executors of the estate, and were not long in discovering that it was insolvent. Mother and daughter were shifted about with almost monthly regularity from one house to the other; and, though they tried to make themselves useful in every capacity except that of a servant, they could not disguise the conviction that their departure was an event a great deal more welcome than their coming. The widow's talent for dressmaking (she had been a milliner's apprentice before marriage), though of a high order, and exerted to the utmost, failed to please. Miss Pillbody's thorough knowledge of French, and the higher branches of an elegant education, as well as her proficiency on the piano, and her sweet, simple style of ballad singing, were worse than useless acquirements in her uncles' families. Her uncles were cold, stern, ignorant men, who had an intense hatred for the mere accomplishments of life. Each had two daughters, who, with the natural tastes of the sex, were not averse to the graces of education, in the abstract, but could not bear to see them displayed by their "stuck-up, pauper cousin," as they often termed that hapless young lady in private conversation. A kind offer, which she was imprudent enough, to make, to teach them all she knew, had set them against her from the first.