ast. And he could walk home from his chambers every
day, and on Sundays could do the round of the parks on foot. Twice a
week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, he dined at that old law club, the
Eldon, and played whist after dinner till twelve o'clock. This was
the great dissipation and, I think, the chief charm of his life. In
the middle of August he and his daughter usually went for a month
to Wharton Hall in Herefordshire, the seat of his cousin Sir Alured
Wharton;--and this was the one duty of his life which was a burthen
to him. But he had been made to believe that it was essential to his
health, and to his wife's, and then to his girl's health, that he
should every summer leave town for a time,--and where else was he to
go? Sir Alured was a relation and a gentleman. Emily liked Wharton
Hall. It was the proper thing. He hated Wharton Hall, but then he did
not know any place out of London that he would not hate worse. He
had once been induced to go up the Rhine, but had never repeated the
experiment of foreign travel. Emily sometimes went abroad with her
cousins, during which periods it was supposed that the old lawyer
spent a good deal of his time at the Eldon. He was a spare, thin,
strongly made man, with spare light brown hair, hardly yet grizzled,
with small grey whiskers, clear eyes, bushy eyebrows, with a long
ugly nose, on which young barristers had been heard to declare that
you might hang a small kettle, and with considerable vehemence of
talk when he was opposed in argument. For, with all his well-known
coolness of temper, Mr. Wharton could become very hot in an argument,
when the nature of the case in hand required heat. On one subject
all who knew him were agreed. He was a thorough lawyer. Many doubted
his eloquence, and some declared that he had known well the extent
of his own powers in abstaining from seeking the higher honours of
his profession; but no one doubted his law. He had once written a
book,--on the mortgage of stocks in trade; but that had been in early
life, and he had never since dabbled in literature.

He was certainly a man of whom men were generally afraid. At the
whist-table no one would venture to scold him. In the court no one
ever contradicted him. In his own house, though he was very quiet,
the servants dreaded to offend him, and were attentive to his
slightest behests. When he condescended to ride with any acquaintance
in the park, it was always acknowledged that old Wharton was to