calmly and with intention
aforethought.

"This paper is for the sole use of the heir whom I shall choose.

"If it be his will not to accept a fortune accumulated under these
conditions or in the way I made mine, I have joined to this a paper
with the names of those to whose heirs reparation can be made. But it
is my present intention to seek rather some strong man, at war with
other men--a hater of his kind, as I have good reason to be--who will
continue my work after I am gone. So that in time, if the life of our
instrument, Jeremy Orrin, be spared, one of the greatest fortunes of
the age may be built up.

"From my youth I was called Miser Hobby. And that most unjustly.
Because I wrought day and night that I might leave my one daughter Bell
in a position of a lady. But she chose to throw my lifetime's work in
my face. She left me without a word for a penniless boy in a uniform.
My heart had been black and bitter before, but there had always been a
bright spot upon it. That was Bell. Afterward it became black
altogether, for I cast Bell out of my heart and sight like an untimely
birth. I worked harder, yet for all that I wearied of the work. To be
rich suddenly, to have all in my power, and to deny to Bell and her
tramping rascal of a redcoat a sup of broth, a bite of bread--that
alone I counted sweet. It would come to me some day, I knew.

"I looked about for a weapon--for the hand to strike. This I found in
Jeremy Orrin. It was at the Tryst of Longtown, whither I had gone to
deliver a web. There I saw a limber youth, very dark, turning
somersaults on a scrap of carpet. He spread out his hands and walked
on them. There was hair on the palms. The thumb was as long as the
fingers, and he raised himself upon them as on steel springs. I saw
him take a byre 'grape'--or fork of three thick prongs--and bend the
three into one by the mere strength of one hand.

"Then that set me thinking of other things that these fingers might be
taught to do. So, in a little inn, I made the tumbler's acquaintance,
and I could see that at first he eyed me curiously. I could read such
looks. I knew the wickedness that was in his heart. He meant to
murder me on my way home!

"But first I gave him to drink as much as he would. Suddenly I turned
my pockets inside out and let him feel the linings of my coat--there in
that lighted room, to prove that he would not be twopence halfpenny the
richer by the transaction. Th