Perhaps, my friends, you have never heard of a place called Singapore. Well, it’s no matter if you haven’t. It’s a long, long way east, where all sorts of shipping trade, and where all sorts of people live—Chinamen, Malays, Javanese, Bengalees, English, Dutch, and what not. Well, there was at Singapore a certain Dutch family in the pepper trade. They were named Vandervermin. They were all rich, cautious, heavy people; all save Jacob Vandervermin, who when a mere youth was left a poor orphan; left, as it might have seemed, on purpose to exercise the loving benevolence of prosperous uncles and aunts, and flourishing cousins. Alas! the whole body of the Vandervermins considered the poverty of Jacob as a blight—a family reproach; a nuisance that every one sought to put off upon the other. Jacob was the little toe of clay that disgraced the Vandervermin body of brass. And what made him worse, he was, for one with Dutch blood in his veins, a sprightly, frolicsome fellow. He was a beggar, and yet, with a stony hardness of heart—as Peter Vandervermin, the head of the family, declared—he would laugh and make offensive jokes upon his wretchedness. There are men who cannot understand a joke, simply because it is a thing that carries no worth with it in a ledger. Now Peter Vandervermin received a joke—especially the joke of a poor man—as an offence to his judgment and a sidelong sneer at his pocket. His wife, Drusilla Vandervermin, was of the same belief; and in this goodly creed man and wife had reared a numerous family. Jacob Vandervermin was the only outcast of the name who had ever disgraced it by a jest. It was plain he would come to no good; plain that he would die the death of a sinner. When one day his body was found mortally mangled by a tiger, not one of the Vandervermins was shocked or surprised. No: they had always said that something dreadful would happen to him, and it had come about. Jacob was buried—handsomely buried. Not one of the Vandervermins would have given him when alive the value of a coffin nail; but, being dead, the case was altered. The pride of the family was concerned in the funeral; hence, they respected themselves in their treatment of the deceased. Doubtless the ghost of a despised, ill-used relation is propitiated by a costly burial; and thus many a cousin or half-brother who has glided through life in a cobweb coat has superfine cloth upon his coffin.