doors that could anyways be in. I shouldn't have had my nose out of
the door myself, except that I wanted to turn my back on other folks
now, and think of what I had found at Charleston, for I hadn't even
told Harry of it yet.

And as I sat there, who should come along but the postman, as is my
second cousin by the mother's side, and, 'Well, Polly,' says he,
'times do change. They tell me young Alderton is biding with your
folks now.'

'They tell you true for once,' says I.

'Then 'tain't worth my while to be trapesing that mile and a quarter
to leave a letter at the farm, I take it, especially as it's a
registered letter, and him not there to sign for it.'

So I calls Harry out, who was smoking a pipe in the chimney-corner,
as humped and gloomy as a fowl on a wet day, and he was as surprised
as me at getting a letter with a London postmark, and registered
too; and he was that surprised that he kept turning it over and
over, and wondering who it could have come from, till we thought it
would be the best way to open and see, and we did.

'Well, I'm blowed!' says Harry; and then he read it out to me. It
was--

'MY DEAR BROTHER,--I have seen in the papers the melancholy account
of our poor father's decease, and the disastrous circumstances of
his second marriage; and the more I have thought of it, the more it
seems to me that there was a screw loose somewhere. I had the