its bosom, which intermittently oppressed him, as it has
oppressed and still overshadows innumerable better men of our day.

At this moment, in the month of May, 190--, Edmund Melrose had just
passed his seventieth birthday. But the extraordinary energy and vivacity
of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three
years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence;
although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had
developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character.
His aspect, even on the threshold of old age, had still something of the
magnificence of an Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of
the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type. He seemed indeed to
be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other.
His wandering eyes, his long acquisitive fingers, his rapid movements
showed him still the hunter on the trail, to whom everything else was in
truth indifferent but the satisfaction of an instinct which had grown and
flourished on the ruins of a man.

As they drove along, through various portions of the Tower estates, the
eyes of the taciturn driver beside him took note of the dilapidated farm
buildings and the broken gates which a miserly landlord could not be
induced to repair, until an exasperated tenant actually gave notice.
Melrose meanwhile was absorbed in trying to recover a paragraph in the
_Times_ he had caught sight of on a first reading, and had then lost in
the excitement of studying the prices of a sale at Christie's, held the
day before, wherein his own ill luck had led to the bad temper from which
he was suffering. He tracked the passage at last. It ran as follows:

"The late Professor William Mackworth has left the majority of his costly
collections to the nation. To the British Museum will go the marbles and
bronzes, to the South Kensington, the china and the tapestries. Professor
Mackworth made no stipulations, and the authorities of both museums are
free to deal with his bequests as they think best."

Melrose folded the newspaper and put it back into his pocket with a short
sudden laugh, which startled the man beside him. "Stipulations! I should
rather think not! What museum in its senses would accept such piffling
stuff with any _stipulations_ attached? As it is, the greater part will
go into the lumber-rooms; they'll never show them! There's only one
collection that Mackw