u know, sir, my _money_ is _mine_;
and I'll cut you both off. You shan't have a sixpence. I'll rather build
a church, sir; I'll give it towards paying off the national debt, you
rascal. You would steal my daughter--eh!"

Thus spoke Mr. Carnaby in his wrath; but when the effervescence of his
indignation had subsided, he extended to both the hand of forgiveness,
and resigned his business in favour of his son-in-law.

Mr. William Sim, therefore, began the world under the most favourable
circumstances. He found a fortune prepared to his hands; he had only to
improve it. In a few years the old grocer died; and he bequeathed to
them the gains of half a century. For twenty years Mr. Sim continued in
business, and he had nearly doubled the fortune which he obtained with
his wife. Mrs. Sim was a kind-hearted woman; but by nature, or through
education, she had also a considerable portion of vanity, and she began
to think that it was the duty of her opulent husband to retire from
business, and assume the character of an independent gentleman; or
rather, I ought to say, of a country gentleman--a squire. She professed
to be the more anxious that he should do this on account of the health
of her daughter--the sole survivor of five children--and who was then
entering upon womanhood. Maria Sim (for such was their daughter's name)
was a delicate and accomplished girl of seventeen. The lovely hue that
dwelt upon her cheeks, like the blush of a rainbow, was an emblem of
beauty, not of health. At the solicitations of her mother, her father
gave up his business, and purchased a neat villa, and a few acres that
surrounded it, in the neighbourhood of Windermere. The house lay in the
bosom of poetry; and the winds that shouted like a triumphant army
through the mountain glens, or in gentle zephyrs sighed upon the lake,
and gambolled with the ripples, made music around it.

The change, the beauty, I had almost said the deliciousness of their
place of abode, had effected a wondrous improvement in the health of
Maria; yet her mother was not happy. She was not treated by her
neighbours with the obsequious reverence which she believed to be due to
persons possessed of twenty thousand pounds. The fashionable ladies in
the neighbourhood, also, called her "a mean person"--"a nobody"--"an
upstart of yesterday." In truth, there were not a few who so spoke,
because they envied the wealth of the Sims, and were resolved to humble
them.

An opportunity