d,
open-handed--a devil-may-care kind of a chap, the type of the
rollicking heroes in old comedies; the very man to fall over head and
ears in love before he was twenty, and to go through fire and water for
the sake of the woman he loved: in short, the very last man upon earth
to live a bachelor until his fifty-fourth year."

"He may--"

"He may have been a profligate, you were going to say, and have had
baser ties than those of Church and State. So he may; but if he was a
scoundrel, tradition flatters him. Of course all the information one
can gather about a man who died in 1774 must needs be of a very
uncertain and fragmentary character. But if I can trust the rather hazy
recollections of my oldest inhabitant about what his father told him
_his_ father had said of wild Mat Haygarth, the young man's wildness
was very free from vice. There is no legend of innocence betrayed or
infamy fostered by Matthew Haygarth. He appears to have enjoyed what
the young men of that day called life--attended cock-fights, beat the
watch, gambled a little, and was intimately acquainted with the
interior of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. For nearly twenty years
he seems to have lived in London; and during all those years he was
lost sight of by the Ullerton people. My oldest inhabitant's
grandfather was clerk to a merchant in the city of London, and had
therefore some opportunity of knowing his old schoolfellow's
proceedings in the metropolis. But the two townsmen don't seem to have
seen much of each other in the big city. Their meetings were rare, and,
so far as I can make out, for the most part accidental. But, as I said
before, my oldest inhabitant is somewhat hazy, and excruciatingly
prolix; his chaff is in the proportion of some fifty to one of his
wheat. I've given a good deal of time to this case already, you see,
Mr. Hawkehurst; and you'll find _your_ work very smooth sailing
compared to what I've gone through."

"I daresay that sort of investigation is rather tiresome in the earlier
stages."

"You'd say so, with a vengeance, if you had to do it," answered George
Sheldon almost savagely. "You start with the obituary of some old bloke
who was so disgustingly old when he consented to die that there is no
one living who can tell you when he was born, or who were his father
and mother; for, of course, the old idiot takes care not to leave a
blessed document of any kind which can aid a fellow in his researches.
And when you've