ious habits. He formed a lasting theme of conversation to the
gossips of the village, with whom the great man at the Hall enjoyed no
enviable notoriety. That Mark Hurdlestone was an object of curiosity,
fear, and hatred, to his humble dependents, created no feeling of
surprise in those who were acquainted with him, and had studied the
repulsive features of his singular character.

There was not a drop of the milk of human kindness in his composition.
Regardless of his own physical wants, he despised the same wants in
others. Charity sued to him in vain, and the tear of sorrow made no
impression on his stony heart. Passion he had felt--cruel, ungovernable
passion. Tenderness was foreign to his nature--the sweet influences of
the social virtues he had never known.

Mark Hurdlestone hated society, and never mingled in festive scenes. To
his neighbors he was a stranger; and he had no friends. With power to
command, and wealth to purchase enjoyment, he had never travelled a
hundred miles beyond the smoke of his own chimneys; and was as much a
stranger to the world and its usages as a savage, born and brought up in
the wilderness. There were very few persons in his native place with
whom he had exchanged a friendly greeting; and though his person was as
well known as the village spire or the town pump, no one could boast
that he had shaken hands with him.

One passion, for the last fifty years of his unhonored life, had
absorbed every faculty of his mind, and, like Aaron's serpent, had
swallowed all the rest. His money-chest was his world; there the gold he
worshipped so devoutly was enshrined; and his heart, if ever he
possessed one, was buried with it: waking or sleeping, his spirit for
ever hovered around this mysterious spot. There nightly he knelt, but
not to pray: prayer had never enlightened the darkened soul of the
gold-worshipper. Favored by the solitude and silence of the night, he
stole thither, to gloat over his hidden treasure. There, during the day,
he sat for hours entranced, gazing upon the enormous mass of useless
metal, which he had accumulated through a long worthless life, to wish
it more, and to lay fresh schemes for its increase. "Vanity of vanities,
all is vanity," saith the preacher; but this hoarding of money is the
very madness of vanity.

Mark Hurdlestone's remarkable person would have formed a good subject
for a painter--it was both singular and striking.

His features in youth had been handso