me, but of that peculiar Jewish
cast which age renders harsh and prominent. The high narrow wrinkled
forehead, the small deep-set jet-black eyes, gleaming like living coals
from beneath straight shaggy eyebrows, the thin aquiline nose, the long
upper lip, the small fleshless mouth and projecting chin, the expression
of habitual cunning and mental reservation, mingled with sullen pride
and morose ill-humor, gave to his marked countenance a repulsive and
sinister character. Those who looked upon him once involuntarily turned
to look upon him again, and marvelled and speculated upon the
disposition and calling of the stranger.

His dress, composed of the coarsest materials, generally hung in tatters
about his tall spare figure, and he had been known to wear the cast-off
shoes of a beggar; yet, in spite of such absurd acts, he maintained a
proud and upright carriage, and never, by his speech or manners, seemed
to forget for one moment that he held the rank of a gentleman. His hands
and face were always scrupulously clean, for water costs nothing, and
time, to him, was an object of little value. The frequency of these
ablutions he considered conducive to health. Cold water was his only
beverage--the only medicine he ever condescended to use.

The stranger who encountered Mark Hurdlestone, wandering barefooted on
the heath or along the dusty road, marvelled that a creature so wretched
did not stop him to solicit charity; and, struck with the haughty
bearing which his squalid dress could not wholly disguise, naturally
imagined that he had seen better days, and was too proud to beg;
influenced by this supposition, he had offered the lord of many manors
the relief which his miserable condition seemed to demand; and such was
the powerful effect of the ruling passion, that the man of gold, the
possessor of millions, the sordid wretch who, in after years, wept at
having to pay four thousand a year to the property tax, calmly pocketed
the affront.

The history of Mark Hurdlestone, up to the present period, had been
marked by few, but they were striking incidents. Those bright links,
interwoven in the rusty chain of his existence, which might have
rendered him a wiser and a better man, had conduced very little to his
own happiness, but they had influenced, in a remarkable degree, the
happiness and misery of others, and form another melancholy proof of the
mysterious manner in which the crimes of some men act, like fate, upon
the d