rs; and as he came
when he was twenty, he is consequently about my age now,--I shouldn't
wonder if a trifle older than you. He came here because an immense
estate was bequeathed him on the condition that he should occupy this
corner of it during one-half of every year from his twenty-first to his
thirty-first He has chosen to occupy it during the entire year, running
down now and then to have a little music or see a little painting.
Sometimes a parcel of his friends,--he never was at college, hasn't
any chums, and has educated himself by all manner of out-of-the-way
dodges,--sometimes these friends, odd specimens, old music-masters,
rambling artists, seedy tutors, fencers, boxers, hunters, clowns, all
light down together, and then the neighborhood rings with this precious
covey: the rest of the year, may-be, he don't see an individual. One
result of this isolation is, that freaks which would be very strange
escapades in other people with him are mere commonplaces. Sometimes he
goes over to the city there, and roams round like a lost soul seeking
for its body; sometimes he goes up a hundred miles or two, takes a guide
and handles the mountains; and, except in the accidents at such times,
he hasn't seen a woman since he came."

"That accounts," said Mrs. Laudersdale.

"Yes. But just think what a life!"

"He wouldn't stay, if he didn't like," replied Mrs. Laudersdale, to whom
the words poverty and riches conveyed not the least idea.

"I don't know. He has an uncle, of whom he is very fond, in India,"
continued Helen,--"an unfortunate kind of man, with whom everything
goes wrong, and who is always taking fevers; and once or twice Mr.
Raleigh has started to go and take care of him, and lose the whole
estate by the means. He intends to endow him, I believe, by-and-by, when
the thing is at his disposal. This uncle kept him at school, when he was
an orphan in different circumstances, at a Jesuit institution; and he
and Miss Kent were always quarrelling over him, and she thought she had
tied up her property nicely out of old Reuben Raleigh's way. It will be
nuts, if he ever accepts his nephew's proposed present. The best of it
all is, that, if he breaks the condition,--there's no accounting for
the caprices of wills,--part of it goes to a needy institution, and part
of it inalienably to Mrs. McLean, who"--

"Is an institution, too."

"Who is not needy. There, isn't that a pretty little _conte?_"

"Very," said Mrs. Lauder