'There's one I hope she'll never take to,' Potters was beginning, but Bolt interrupted him with-- 'Whichever has her will have a fine wife. Let's drink good luck to the new masters, lads.' 'Or, so to say, to oursel', for their's'll be ours,' said Sigley. 'Their bad luck'll be ours; but their good luck's their own,' said Bill Murdoch sententiously. This startling economic theory meeting with no support, the original toast was drunk with a feeble attempt at honours. * * * * * The 'new masters' whose health had thus been unenthusiastically drunk found it hard to realise the peculiar position in which they found themselves. The will was a great surprise to them both. Neither had thought that the slight breach which had come between them was sufficiently wide to be noticed, and the very fact of its having been noticed made it appear deeper and more serious than they had before considered it to be. It was a bitter thought to Richard Ferrier that the old man's last moments should have been made unquiet through any conduct of his, and he reproached himself for not having concealed his own feelings better, and for not having watched more keenly over those of his father. The most crushing part of bereavement is always the consciousness that so little more thought, so little more tact and tenderness, would have sufficed to spare that ended life many an hour of sorrow, that quiet heart many a pang of pain. It is then that we would give our heart's blood for one hour with the beloved in which to tell them all that we might have said so easily while they were here. This universal longing is responsible for that deeply rooted belief in the life beyond the grave which causes two-thirds of human-kind to dispense with evidence and to set reason at nought. So long as the sons and daughters of men Weep by silent graves alone, so long will the priest find his penitent, the professor of modern spiritualism his open-mouthed dupe, and the shrine its devotee. The ages roll on, each year the old earth opens her bosom for our dearest, and still man--slow learner that he is--will not realise that (whatever may be the chances of another life in which to set right what has been here done amiss) in this life, which is the only one he can be sure of having, it rests with him to decide whether there shall be any acts of unkindness that will seem to need atonement. The consolation which so many find in the idea of a future life was a closed door to Dick. He had belonged to the 'advanced' school of thought at college, and to him the gulf which separated him from his father was one that could never be bridged over.