ntricacies of a
family tree as Mr. Sheldon, the astute attorney and practised
genealogist.

"I have traced these Haygarths back to the intestate's
great-grandfather, who was a carpenter and a Puritan in the reign of
Charles the First. He seems to have made money--how I have not been
able to discover with any certainty; but it is more than probable he
served in the civil wars, and came in for some of the plunder those
crop-eared, psalm-singing,
pierce-the-brain-of-the-tyrant-with-the-nail-of-Jael scoundrels were
always in the way of, at the sack of Royalist mansions. The man made
money; and his son, the grandfather of the intestate, was a wealthy
citizen in the reigns of Anne and the first George. He was a grocer,
and lived in the market-place of Ullerton in Leicestershire; an
out-of-the-way sleepy place it is now, but was prosperous enough in
those days, I daresay. This man (the grandfather) began the world well
off, and amassed a large fortune before he had done with it. The lucky
beggar lived in the days when free trade and competition were unknown,
when tea was something like sixty shillings a pound, and when a
psalm-singing sleek-haired fellow, with a reputation for wealth and
honesty, might cheat his customers to his heart's content. He had one
son, Matthew, who seems, from what I can gather, to have been a wild
sort of fellow in the early part of his career, and not to have been at
any time on the best possible terms with the sanctimonious dad. This
Matthew married at fifty-three years of age, and died a year after his
marriage, leaving one son, who afterwards became the reverend
intestate; with whom, according to the evidence at present before me,
ends the direct line of the Haygarths." The lawyer paused, turned over
two or three papers, and then resumed his explanation. "The
sanctimonious grocer, Jonathan Haygarth, had one other child besides
the son--a daughter called Ruth, who married a certain Peter Judson,
and became the mother of a string of sons and daughters; and it is
amongst the descendants of these Judsons that we may have to look for
our heir at law, unless we find him nearer home. Now my idea is that we
_shall_ find him nearer home."

"What reason have you for forming that idea?" asked Valentine.

"I will tell you. This Matthew Haygarth is known to have been a wild
fellow. I obtained a good deal of fragmentary information about him
from an old man in some almshouses at Ullerton, whose grandfather