Within half an hour, he was on his road to Liverpool; having indited a few hasty lines to Denny Cross. stating that unexpected business called him from town. The fidgety clerk, to whom he did not vouchsafe even this information, began to fear, indeed, that his employer's wits must be failing him. For Mr. Woolston had silenced all his appeals for instruction concerning his business during his absence, by sending them headlong to the spot with which his learned profession is said to be only too intimately familiar.

CHAPTER V.

As extremes meet, the effects of a sudden stroke of good fortune often resemble those of a sudden stroke of evil. John Woolston was all but stupefied by the startling transition of his destinies from iron to gold. Though it was Midsummer,plenteous, beauteous Midsummer, -he never once remarked, in his transit from the banks of the Thames to those of the Mersey, so much as that the earth was green, or that the skies were blue.

The journey, though even then curtailed by railway acceleration, was of eight hours' con

tinuance. Yet it scarcely sufficed for the mental arithmetic of the practical John. His professional experience supplied him with a thousand minor uneasinesses. These old-fashioned country attorneys, who addressed him with such obsequious civility and seemed at present to be sole custodians of his untold treasures, were probably harpies of the first magnitude. He must keep a sharp watch over their proceedings, and assume the reins of government with an unswerving hand; or to what spoliation might he not be exposed by his utter ignorance of the nature and amount of his uncle's property! Already he began to wonder whether it consisted chiefly in land, or had been invested in government securities, or private speculations. He had heard, vaguely and with indifference, nay, perhaps with some degree of the contempt for commercial pursuits inherent in the blood of all the Woolstons, that the Wraysburys were largely connected with houses in New York and New Orleans. But, as far as was in his power, he would realise and

consolidate the estate. The vicissitudes of mercantile life were not suited to his taste.

Already, a cubit was added to his stature. The golden leaven was fermenting in his veins. -Mammon had marked him for his own!The only feeling likely to

neutralise

these mercenary influences, arose from anticipating the benefits secured by his accession of fortune to his patient wife and promising little girl; to say nothing of the hearty joy about to animate the honest family at Denny Cross.

But alas! no sooner did his thoughts revert from them and their homely happiness, to Harrals and its animosities, than his heart hardened again. The vindictive old man who had screwed him down in durance,-the inert mother, who had raised neither voice nor hand to resist the tyranny by which her eldest-born had been exiled from his place at their fireside, and his eldest-born from his place in the family vault, -and whose envious feelings were about to

receive a death-blow in the announcement of the preference accorded him by his opulent kinsman,—were never, never to be forgiven.

As to his sisters and their husbands, so long as they breathed, never would he overlook their neglect of his unpretending wife and suffering boy! Not so much as a particle-not so much as a single bright reflection of his heaps of coin, -should lighten their comparative darkness.

Already, as we said before, the golden leprosy was beginning to corrode the nature of John Woolston.

Nor were these narrow sentiments likely to be ennobled by contact with the cringing attorneys, who, after submitting for thirty years to the bearish despotism of old Wraysbury, were prepared to accept from the hands of his representative any amount of contumely. Habituated to the most vulgar species of insolencethat of purse-pride-Wortham and Stock were too much surprised to find John Woolston commonly courteous, to notice that he was