ntions
in respect of his granddaughter.

I should only weary you if I attempted to relate all the pitiful
stories of mischief-making and counter-mischief-making with which,
long before the birth of Francis, the General and Aunt Sophia
endeavoured to render each other's life miserable. I now comprehend
that she neither could nor would leave her fortune to such a man,
and I approve of the course she has taken for Francis' sake, who
would have been the greatest sufferer if her aunt had not acted with
so much foresight and prudence. The General is a spendthrift, or,
to put it in the mildest terms, a bad financier. His affairs, the
lawyer says--and the lawyer evidently knows more about them than the
General does himself--are in such a state that, to use an expression
of Macaulay's, "the whole wealth of the East would not suffice to
put them in order and keep them so."

Still, does this justify my aunt's inexorable hatred? I am sure, if
you saw her portrait, you would scarcely believe her capable of it:
a stately dame in a rich black silk gown, with silvery grey hair under
a black lace cap, and a string of priceless pearls round her neck--so
she appears in a painting done in the last year of her life. And this
she has bequeathed to her legal adviser, because she believed none
of her relations would be able to look upon it with pleasure. On this
point, I fancy, she was not far deceived. I myself, her favoured heir,
honestly confess that much must happen, much be cleared up, before I
can regard it with any degree of cheerfulness and gratitude, seeing I
know what a Shylock-spirit once breathed in that thin, slender figure
of a woman. The lawyer bore testimony to her kindness to the poor,
but said she was very singular in her ways of life and thought. Being
strictly orthodox himself, he accounts for all her singularities
by saying they are the outcome of her great admiration of the ideas
prevalent in the eighteenth century; she was an admirer of Rousseau,
and actually adorned her room with a statuette of Voltaire. In fact,
she had herself painted holding a volume of Voltaire's Correspondence
in her hand, though she knew this would not be particularly pleasing
to the future possessor of that portrait.

"Well, well, Jonker," he continued, "since you ask me for the truth
about the life and actions of your deceased aunt, I must tell you she
seldom went to church, and when she did it was to the French church,
though she was not a