sealed instructions went into
his banker's strong-room, and the Colonel's letters, periodically
reporting him a living man, were received and opened by our family
lawyer, Mr. Bruff, as my father's representative. No sensible person,
in a similar position, could have viewed the matter in any other way.
Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our
own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it
in a newspaper."

It was plain to me from this, that Mr. Franklin thought his father's
notion about the Colonel hasty and wrong.

"What is your own private opinion about the matter, sir?" I asked.

"Let's finish the story of the Colonel first," says Mr. Franklin. "There
is a curious want of system, Betteredge, in the English mind; and your
question, my old friend, is an instance of it. When we are not occupied
in making machinery, we are (mentally speaking) the most slovenly people
in the universe."

"So much," I thought to myself, "for a foreign education! He has learned
that way of girding at us in France, I suppose."

Mr. Franklin took up the lost thread, and went on.

"My father," he said, "got the papers he wanted, and never saw his
brother-in-law again from that time. Year after year, on the prearranged
days, the prearranged letter came from the Colonel, and was opened by
Mr. Bruff. I have seen the letters, in a heap, all of them written in
the same brief, business-like form of words: 'Sir,--This is to certify
that I am still a living man. Let the Diamond be. John Herncastle.' That
was all he ever wrote, and that came regularly to the day; until some
six or eight months since, when the form of the letter varied for the
first time. It ran now: 'Sir,--They tell me I am dying. Come to me, and
help me to make my will.' Mr. Bruff went, and found him, in the little
suburban villa, surrounded by its own grounds, in which he had lived
alone, ever since he had left India. He had dogs, cats, and birds to
keep him company; but no human being near him, except the person who
came daily to do the house-work, and the doctor at the bedside. The will
was a very simple matter. The Colonel had dissipated the greater part of
his fortune in his chemical investigations. His will began and ended in
three clauses, which he dictated from his bed, in perfect possession
of his faculties. The first clause provided for the safe keeping
and support of his animals. The second founded a professorshi