treatise on the system to which he bequeathed his name. The material
is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I scorn to appear vainglorious.
Tonti is dead, and I never saw anyone who even pretended to regret him;
and, as for the tontine system, a word will suffice for all the purposes
of this unvarnished narrative.

A number of sprightly youths (the more the merrier) put up a certain sum
of money, which is then funded in a pool under trustees; coming on for
a century later, the proceeds are fluttered for a moment in the face of
the last survivor, who is probably deaf, so that he cannot even hear of
his success--and who is certainly dying, so that he might just as well
have lost. The peculiar poetry and even humour of the scheme is now
apparent, since it is one by which nobody concerned can possibly profit;
but its fine, sportsmanlike character endeared it to our grandparents.

When Joseph Finsbury and his brother Masterman were little lads
in white-frilled trousers, their father--a well-to-do merchant
in Cheapside--caused them to join a small but rich tontine of
seven-and-thirty lives. A thousand pounds was the entrance fee; and
Joseph Finsbury can remember to this day the visit to the lawyer's,
where the members of the tontine--all children like himself--were
assembled together, and sat in turn in the big office chair, and signed
their names with the assistance of a kind old gentleman in spectacles
and Wellington boots. He remembers playing with the children afterwards
on the lawn at the back of the lawyer's house, and a battle-royal that
he had with a brother tontiner who had kicked his shins. The sound of
war called forth the lawyer from where he was dispensing cake and
wine to the assembled parents in the office, and the combatants were
separated, and Joseph's spirit (for he was the smaller of the two)
commended by the gentleman in the Wellington boots, who vowed he had