‘This is pretty treatment, sir,’ said Monks, throwing down his hat and cloak, ‘from my father’s oldest friend.’

‘It is because I was your father’s oldest friend, young man,’ returned Mr. Brownlow; ‘it is because the hopes and wishes of young and happy years were bound up with him, and that fair creature of his blood and kindred who rejoined her God in youth, and left me here a solitary, lonely man: it is because he knelt with me beside his only sisters’s death-bed when he was yet a boy, on the morning that would — but Heaven willed otherwise — have made her my young wife; it is because my seared heart clung to him, from that time forth, through all his trials and errors, till he died; it is because old recollections and associations filled my