burden to him. But he had been made to believe that it was
essential to his health, and to his wife's, and then to his
girl's, health, that he should every summer leave town for a
time,--and where else was there to go? Sir Alured was a
relation and a gentleman. Emily liked Wharton Hall. It was the
proper thing. He hated Wharton Hall, but then he did not know
any place out of London that he would not hate worse. He had
once been induced to go up the Rhine; but had never repeated the
experiment of foreign travel. Emily sometimes went abroad with
her cousins during which periods it was supposed that the old
lawyer spent a good deal of his time at the Eldon. He was a
spare, thin, strongly made man, with spare light brown hair,
hardly yet grizzled, with small grey whiskers, clear eyes, bushy
eyebrows, with a long ugly nose, on which young barristers had
been heard to declare that you might hang a small kettle, and
with considerable vehemence of talk when he was opposed in
argument. For, with all his well-known coolness of temper, Mr
Wharton could become very hot in an argument, when the nature of
the case in hand required heat. On one subject all who knew him
were agreed. He was a thorough lawyer. Many doubted his
eloquence, and some declared that he had known well the extent of
his own powers in abstaining from seeking the higher honours of
his profession; but no one doubted his law. He had once written
a book,--on the mortgage of stocks in trade; but that had been
in early life, and he had never since dabbled in literature.

He was certainly a man of whom men were generally afraid. At the
whist-table no one would venture to scold him. In the court no
one ever contradicted him. In his own house, though he was very
quiet, the servants dreaded to offend him, and were attentive to