And this was the man who, with a rent-roll of £15,000 a-year, was about to avail himself of a legal quibble, in order to extort from a widow and orphans a share of the little pittance that remained to them. His agent Mr. Selby, was a better man than his master; and might have been better still, if “his poverty, and not his will,” had not led him to consent to be the instrument wherewith Sir Thomas Crawley, M.P., transacted much dirty work in Ashburn and its vicinity. At the time we treat of the will had so often yielded that it had quite lost the habit of asserting itself; and the poverty, profiting by this inertness, had gradually disappeared, till Mr. Selby was generally looked upon as a man well to do in the world, and respected accordingly. And this brings us back to the point from whence we originally started; namely, that the Rosebud of Ashburn possessed a female friend. Now, the office of female friend to a Rosebud, romantic and poetical as it sounds, was by no means a sinecure; indeed, from the confidant of Tilburnia downwards, these sympathisers of all work have hard places of it. Still, there appears to be no lack of amiable creatures ready to devote themselves to the cause of friendship; the supply seems always to equal the demand. Possibly occasional perquisites, in the shape of a heart caught in the rebound, as in the case of a discarded lover, or the reversion of some _bon parti_, rejected for a more eligible offer, may have something to do with it--of this we cannot pretend to judge.