Hugh Clifford's father was a descendant, by a younger branch, of a noble family, and had gained a considerable fortune as a merchant in the port of Hull. He died in the beginning of the reign of George the Third, and left his accumulated wealth to his only son, who was then at college. Hugh hastened home, on the sudden death of his father, and, by the advice of a few friends, resolved to carry on his father's mercantile concern. Twelve months, however, served to disgust him with business. His wealth, instead of augmenting, began rapidly to decrease under the peculations of clerks and managers, to whom the business was necessarily entrusted, and he took the resolution, ere it was too late, of retiring, after he had disposed of his "concern," to a pretty little estate which had fallen to him, by his mother's right, at the pleasant little rural town of Kirton-in-Lindsey, that like "a city set on a hill" delights the eye of the traveller for miles before he reaches it. For many years, Hugh Clifford's house was a general refuge for the distressed. None ever knocked at his gate, and told a tale of want, but they found instant relief. Hugh Clifford's heart was expansive as Nature herself. He felt that all men were his brethren, and that, if he merely tendered them lip-kindness when they were in sorrow, it was but mockery. He pondered over the precepts and history of the Great Exemplar, until, nature and reason combining to stimulate him, his whole life became an effort to banish the misery of human-kind. And yet the sphere in which he acted was comparatively narrow; for his natural intelligence was not of that high order which marks out for itself extended fields of enterprize in philanthropy. Hugh Clifford could not be termed a planet, like Howard, that visited widely distant climes in its great dispensing orbit of goodness; but he was most veritably a star of benevolence, that cheered with a pure and genial light all within its neighbourhood who partook of woe and wretchedness.