so anxious.
His thoughts were always dwelling on it, so that the whole peace and
comfort of his life were disturbed. A life-interest in a property
is, perhaps, as much as a man desires to have when he for whose
protection he is debarred from further privileges of ownership is
a well-loved son;--but an entail that limits an owner's rights on
behalf of an heir who is not loved, who is looked upon as an enemy,
is very grievous. And in this case the man who was so limited,
so cramped, so hedged in, and robbed of the true pleasures of
ownership, had a son with whom he would have been willing to share
everything,--whom it would have been his delight to consult as to
every roof to be built, every tree to be cut, every lease to be
granted or denied. He would dream of telling his son, with a certain
luxury of self-abnegation, that this or that question as to the
estate should be settled in the interest, not of the setting, but of
the rising sun. "It is your affair rather than mine, my boy;--do as
you like." He could picture to himself in his imagination a pleasant,
half-mock melancholy in saying such things, and in sharing the reins
of government between his own hands and those of his heir. As the
sun is falling in the heavens and the evening lights come on, this
world's wealth and prosperity afford no pleasure equal to this. It
is this delight that enables a man to feel, up to the last moment,
that the goods of the world are good. But of all this he was to be
robbed,--in spite of all his prudence. It might perhaps sometimes
occur to him that he by his own vice had brought this scourge upon
his back;--but not the less on that account did it cause him to rebel
against the rod. Then there would come upon him the idea that he
might cure this evil were his energy sufficient;--and all that he
heard of that nephew and heir, whom he hated, tended to make him
think that the cure was within his reach. There had been moments
in which he had planned a scheme of leading on that reprobate into
quicker and deeper destruction, of a pretended friendship with the
spendthrift, in order that money for speedier ruin might be lent on
that security which the uncle himself was so anxious to possess as
his very own. But the scheme of this iniquity, though it had been
planned and mapped out in his brain, had never been entertained as
a thing really to be done. There are few of us who have not allowed
our thoughts to work on this or that villany, arrang