From simple sources; and great seas have dried; When miracles have by the greatest been denied. Oft expectation fails, and most oft there, Where most it promises; and oft it hits Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits. --Shakspere. Mr. Grahame entered his library, on the morning following his interview with Chewkle, at least an hour before the time appointed for the return of that individual, with the deed which he had promised to obtain, and of which he had possessed himself--to use as an instrument of extortion. There was no sound in the library, save the ticking of the valuable and exquisitely finished specimen of handicraft, the skeleton timepiece, upon the broad marble mantel-shelf, for Mr. Grahame sat with hands clasped before him, plunged in profound, and uneasy thought. But though a death-like stillness pervaded the apartment, there was a terrible storm raging within his bosom. Mr. Grahame’s position was perilous and critical. On attaining his majority, he had inherited landed property, from which he derived an income of nearly ten thousand a year, and personal property to the value of thirty thousand pounds. He married a near relative of a Scotch Duke, also a Grahame, and kin of many of the proudest--if poorest--families in Scotland. With her he had a dowry of ten thousand pounds; and thus he may be said to have commenced his married life in a station of affluence, and with the brightest prospects of happiness. But he had, during his minority, been brought up in parsimonious seclusion. Like the majority of his race, he was burdened with an arrogant pride--a pride that would eat toasted herrings and potatoes in state, that would look down in ineffable scorn upon the tradesmen it was too poor to pay--a pride that was essentially inflation, and wholly devoid of true dignity. When approaching manhood, provided with the narrowest allowance, he had preferred to be chiefly in the glen or on the mountain, where but little money was needed, to mixing with the gay world into which his narrow stipend would have introduced him--slightly above the condition of a beggar. And thus he passed his minority away, yearning for the death of his miserly father, who scraped, and saved, and accumulated, without a thought crossing him that some day the mean and acquisitive spirit which inhabited his frame would take its flight suddenly to the unknown land; and, with the old and withered trunk it had inhabited, leave all the savings, and dirty hoardings and scrapings behind. So it turned out. One morning old Grahame was found at the threshold of his bed-room door--a stiff, stark, grinning corpse--and Claverhouse Grahame was declared the inheritor of ten thousand a year, and thirty thousand pounds besides.