story.

Old Lindsay himself, although he mentioned the Goodwins with moderation,
could not help feeling strongly and bitterly the loss of property which
his children had sustained, owing to this unexpected disposition of it
by their uncle. Here, then, were two families who had lived in mutual
good-will and intimacy, now placed fronting each other in a spirit of
hostility. The Goodwins felt indignant that their motives should
be misinterpreted by what they considered deliberate falsehood and
misrepresentation; and the Lindsays could not look in silence upon
the property which they thought ought to be theirs, transferred to the
possession of strangers, who had wheedled a dotard to make a will
in their favor. Such, however, in thousands of instances, are the
consequences of the

_"Opes irritamenta malorum."_

The above facts, in connection with these two families, and the future
incidents of our narrative, we have deemed it necessary, for I the
better understanding of what follows, to place in a preliminary sketch
before our readers.




CHAPTER II. A Murderer's Wake and the Arrival of a Stranger


It is the month of June, and the sun has gone down amidst a mass of
those red and angry clouds which prognosticate a night of storm and