n,--the affections of home, the caresses
of children, among whom I may find one to whom hereafter I may
bequeath, in my knowledge, a far nobler heritage than my lands. In
that case, however, my first care would be to assure your own
fortunes. And the sum which this codicil assures to my betrothed
would be transferred to yourself on my wedding-day. Do you know why,
never having seen you, I thus select you for preference to all my
other kindred; why my heart, in writing thus, warms to your image?
Richard Strahan, your only sister, many years older than yourself--you
were then a child--was the object of my first love. We were to have
been wedded, for her parents deceived me into the belief that she
returned my affection. With a rare and nobler candour, she herself
informed me that her heart was given to another, who possessed not my
worldly gifts of wealth and station. In resigning my claims to her
hand, I succeeded in propitiating her parents to her own choice. I
obtained for her husband the living which he held, and I settled on
your sister the dower which, at her death, passed to you as the
brother to whom she had shown a mother's love, and the interest of
which has secured you a modest independence.

"If these lines ever reach you, recognize my title to reverential
obedience to commands which may seem to you wild, perhaps irrational;
and repay, as if a debt due froth your own lost sister, the affection
I have borne to you for her sake."

While I read this long and strange letter, Strahan sat by my side,
covering his face with his hands, and weeping with honest tears for the
man whose death had made him powerful and rich.

"You will undertake the trust ordained to me in this letter," said he,
struggling to compose himself. "You will read and edit this memoir;
you are the very man he himself would have selected. Of your honour and
humanity there can be no doubt, and you have studied with success the
sciences which he specifies as requisite for the discharge of the task
he commands."

At this request, though I could not be wholly unprepared for it, my
first impulse was that of a vague terror. It seemed to me as if I were
becoming more and more entangled in a mysterious and fatal web. But this
impulse soon faded in the eager yearnings of an ardent and irresistible
curiosity.

I promised to read the manuscript, and in order th