, wadding
manufacturers in Lady-lane--was the grand question. On inquiring of the
landlord as to the antecedents of these Judsons, I found that they were
all supposed to spring from one common stock, and to have the blood of
old Jonathan Haygarth in their veins. The Judsons had been an obscure
family--people of "no account," my landlord told me, until Joseph
Judson, chapman and cloth merchant in a very small way, was so
fortunate as to win the heart of Ruth Haygarth, only daughter of the
wealthy Nonconformist grocer in the market-place. This marriage had
been the starting-point of Joseph Judson's prosperity. Old Haygarth had
helped his industrious and respectable son-in-law along the stony road
that leads to fortune, and had no doubt given him many a lift over the
stones which bestrew that toilsome highway. My landlord's information
was as vague as the information of people in general; but it was easily
to be made out, from his scanty shreds and scraps of information, that
the well-placed Judsons of the present day had almost all profited to
some extent by the hard-earned wealth of Jonathan Haygarth. "They've
nearly all of them got the name of Haygarth mixed up with their other
names somehow," said my landlord. "Judson of Judson and Grinder is
Thomas Haygarth Judson. He's a member of our tradesman's club, and
worth a hundred thousand pounds, if he's worth a sixpence."

I have observed, by the way, that a wealthy tradesman in a country town
is never accredited with less than a hundred thousand; there seems a
natural hankering in the human mind for round numbers.

"There's J.H. Judson of St. Gamaliel," continued my landlord--"he's
James Haygarth Judson; and young Judson the attorney's son puts
'Haygarth Judson' on his card, and gets people to call him Haygarth
Judson when they will--which in a general way they won't, on account of
his giving himself airs, which you may see him any summer evening
walking down Ferrygate as if the place belonged to him, and he didn't
set much value on it. They _do_ say his father's heir-at-law to a
million of money left by the last of the Haygarths, and that he and the
son are trying to work up a claim to the property against the Crown.
But I have heard young Judson deny it in our room when he was spoken to
about it, and I don't suppose there's much ground for people's talk."

I was sorry to discover there was any ground for such talk; Mr. Judson
the lawyer would be no insignificant oppone