, that there is no impropriety in disclosing the
facts after all these years, and of this I trust my professional record
is sufficient guaranty.

At the time of which I write I was junior partner in the firm of
Paulding & Wainwright, and our offices were on Front Street, in the
heart of the shipping business.

Josiah Bateman had been a client of Mr. Paulding long before I was
admitted to a partnership. His Will had been in our safe for fifteen
years, but neither my partner nor I knew its terms, for the old man had
drawn it up himself. "He guessed he knew enough law to give away his
property," he told us as we witnessed the instrument.

Mr. Bateman ought to have known some law. Certainly he had expended
enough money in litigation to pay for a hundred legal educations. Indeed
his genius for disputes would have made him an ideal client save for one
fact--he seldom took the advice of his lawyers. It naturally followed
that his success in the Courts was by no means encouraging. Whenever he
won a suit he claimed all the credit, and if he lost, our responsibility
was voiced by the loser in a tone only a little more offensive than his
self-gratulation. People used to wonder how we got on with the man, but
we were accustomed to his vagaries, and despite his declamations he paid
handsomely and promptly for every service rendered.

As he grew older Mr. Bateman's tendency to litigate increased
tremendously and the Office Register coupled his name with every kind of
law suit from a dispossess proceeding to a knotty problem in the law of
nations.

Mr. Bateman had never married, and he never spoke of his relatives to
anyone. Down-town New York knew him as a clear-headed, obstinate,
hard-working, irascible merchant who had made a great deal of money. But
there information stopped. His fortune was variously estimated from a
million up to five millions--one guess being as good as another in the
absence of any known facts.

So when the news came that Josiah Bateman was dead I think everybody
connected with our firm, from the senior partner to the office boy, was
curious to learn how the old man had left his money.

The news of his death did not reach us until a week after he had been
buried. We were then advised by letter that he had been on a hunting
trip in the Adirondacks and had become ill and died when far away from
any town. The guides seem to have known nothing about him and he was
buried at the nearest cemetery. No papers