Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death--his only daughter and only child, Eleanor. The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment had been more transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our own language, designate as _les intimes_.