nvitation to dine there. The dinners were good, and the
men who ate them were men of solidity and standing in the commercial
world; and George was very glad to eat good dinners, and to meet
eligible men; but he never again asked his brother for the loan of odd
hundreds.

He grubbed on, as best he might, in the dingy Gray's-Inn chambers. Be
had a little business--business which lay chiefly amongst men who
wanted to borrow money, or whose halting footsteps required guidance
through the quagmire of the Bankruptcy Court. He just contrived to keep
his head above water, and his name in the Law-list, by means of such
business; but the great scheme of his life remained as yet unripened,
an undeveloped shadow to which he had in vain attempted to give a
substance.

The leading idea of George Sheldon's life was the idea that there were
great fortunes in the world waiting for claimants; and that a share of
some such fortune was to be obtained by any man who had the talent to
dig it out of the obscurity in which it was hidden. He was a student of
old county histories, and a searcher of old newspapers; and his studies
in that line had made him familiar with many strange stories--stories
of field-labourers called away from the plough to be told they were the
rightful owners of forty thousand a year; stories of old white-haired
men starving to death in miserable garrets about Bethnal-green or
Spitalfields, who could have claimed lands and riches immeasurable, had
they known how to claim them; stories of half-crazy old women, who had
wandered about the world with reticules of discoloured papers
clamorously asserting their rights and wrongs unheeded and unbelieved,
until they encountered sharp-witted lawyers who took up their claims,
and carried them triumphantly into the ownership of illimitable wealth.

George Sheldon had read of these things until it had seemed to him that
there must be some such chance for any man who would have patience to
watch and wait for it. He had taken up several cases, and had fitted
link after link together with extreme labour, and had hunted in parish
registers until the cold mouldy atmosphere of vestries was as familiar
to him as the air of Gray's Inn. But the cases had all broken down at
more or less advanced stages; and after infinite patience and trouble,
a good deal of money spent upon travelling and small fees to all manner
of small people, and an incalculable number of hours wasted in
listening to