but shortly to be reunited family--
at this very time a few of the leading creditors of the Wishwash and
Longstop Railway assembled in the old office of that bankrupt
undertaking, and decided to accept an offer from the Grand Roundabout
Railway to buy up their undertaking at half-price, and add its few
hundred miles of line to their own few thousand.

A very important decision this for the little Dull Street family. For
among the English creditors of this same Wishwash and Longstop Railway
Mr Cruden had been one of the most considerable--so considerable that
the shares he held in it had amounted to about half his fortune.

And when the division of the proceeds of the sale of the railway came to
be divided it turned out that Mr Cruden's administrators, heirs, and
assigns were entitled to about a third of the value of that gentleman's
shares, or in other words, something like a sixth of their old property,
which little windfall, after a good deal of wandering about and search
for an owner, came finally under the notice of Mr Richmond's
successors, who in turn passed it over to Mrs Cruden with a very neat
little note of congratulation on the good fortune which had made her and
her sons the joint proprietors of a snug little income of from L300 to
L400 a year.

Of course the sagacious reader will remark on this that it is only
natural that towards the end of my story something of this sort should
happen, in order to finish up with the remark that "they lived happily
ever after." And his opinion of me will, I fear, be considerably
lowered when he finds that instead of Reginald dying in the smallpox
hospital, and Mrs Cruden and Horace ending their days in the workhouse,
things looked up a little for them towards the finish, and promised a
rather more comfortable future than one had been led to expect.

It is sad, of course, to lose any one's good esteem, but as things
really did look up for the Crudens--as Reginald really did recover, as
Mrs Cruden and Horace really did not go to the workhouse, and as the
Grand Roundabout Railway really was spirited enough to buy up the
Wishwash and Longstop Railway at half-price, I cannot help saying so,
whatever the consequences may be.

But several weeks before Mr Richmond's successors announced this
windfall to their clients, the accident to Major Lambert's horse had
resulted in comfort to the Crudens of another kind, which, if truth must
be told, they expected quite as little and