his slightest behests. When he condescended to ride with any
acquaintance in the park, it was always acknowledged that old
Wharton was to regulate the pace. His name was Abel, and all his
life he had been known as able Abe,--a silent, far-seeing,
close-fisted, just old man, who, was not, however, by any means
deficient in sympathy either with the sufferings or with the joys
of humanity.

It was Easter time, and the courts were not sitting, but Mr
Wharton was in his chamber as a matter of course at ten o'clock.
He knew no real homely comforts elsewhere,--unless at the whist-
table at the Eldon. He ate and drank and slept in his own house
in Manchester Square, but he could hardly be said to live there.
It was not there that his mind was awake, and the powers of the
man were exercised. When he came up from the dining-room to join
his daughter after dinner, he would get her to sing him a song,
and would then seat himself with a book. But he never read in
his own house, invariably falling into a sweet and placid
slumber, from which he was never disturbed till his daughter
kissed him as she went to bed. Then he would walk about the room
and look at his watch, and shuffle uneasily through half an hour,
till his conscience allowed him to take himself to his chamber.
He was a man of no pursuits in his own house. But from ten in
the morning til five, or often six, in the evening, his mind was
active in some work. It was not now all law, as it used to be.
In the drawer of the old piece of furniture which stood just at
the right hand of his own arm-chair there were various books
hidden away, which he was sometimes ashamed to have seen by his
clients,--poetry and novels, and even fairy tales. For there
was nothing Mr Wharton could not read in his chambers, though