oings
on. He, the son of a hack writer in a lawyer's office! he to be the one,
of all others, to be proposing that all the lawyers and doctors should
be excluded from the public balls! I've a-heerd of his goings on. He
have my property! Why, he'd blush to own who gid it to him. He have it!
No; I'd rather an earthquake swallowed up every acre of it, before a
shovel-full should come to his share."

"Then your other nephew at Exeter?" observed the attorney.

"Dead and buried, and so purvided for," said the timber-merchant.

"I beg your pardon, sir--I had for the moment forgotten that
circumstance; but there's his brother, Mr Montague Potts Beverley, of
Burton Crescent?"

"Wuss and wuss," interrupted the testy old man. "Me give any thing to an
ungrateful dog like that? Why, I actelly lent he money on nothing but
personal security, to set him up in business; and the devil of a
ha-penny could I ever screw out of him beyond principal and legal
interest at five per cent; and, now he's made his forten, he's ashamed
of the name that made it for him--a mean-spirited, henpecked booby, that
cast his name to the dogs to please a silly wife's vanity. He have my
property! I rather calculate not! And so, having disposed of all they, I
think I'll leave my estates to some of brother Thomas's sons. Now,
Grapple, mind me; this is how I'll have it go. In the first place,
intail it on my nephew Thomas, that's the tailor in Regent Street, who,
they says, is worth some thousands already; so what I intends to give
him, will come in nicely;--failing he and his issue, then intail it on
Bill--you knows Bill--he comes here sometimes--travels for a house in
the button line;--failing he and his issue, then upon Bob the letenant
in the navy; he's at sea now, though I be hanged if I know the name of
the ship he belongs to."

Mr Grapple observed that this was unimportant, and then asked if he
should insert the names of any other persons.

"I don't know, really, or very much care whether you does or not,"
replied the timber-merchant. "My late brother Charles," he continued,
"left three sons; but what's become of they all, or whether they be dead
or alive, any of them, I can hardly tell, nor does it very much signify;
for they were a set of extravagant, low-lived, drunken fellows, every
one of them, and not very likely to mend either."

"Then, perhaps you'd rather your heirs at-law should take?" remarked the
attorney.

"No, I'll be hanged if I sh