nature to it."

"That 's the way with the old misers, always," said Mr. Penhallow.

Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
pretending to read it. He took off his spectacles.

"We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow." Then
turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,

"'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat'

"You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?"

While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly
as if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion. His old habits as a
teacher made that easy.

Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on
his cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
excitement.

"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself. He
waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw got up
and left the office. As soon as he and the senior partner were alone,
Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in his library.
There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis,--the
fine Elzevir edition of 1664. It was bound in parchment, and thus
readily distinguishable at a glance from all the books round it. Now
Mr. Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar, and knew and cared
very little about the civil law. He had fallen in with this book at
an auction, and bought it to place in his shelves with the other
"properties" of the office, because it would look respectable. Anything
shut up in one of those two octavos might stay there a lifetime without
Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master Gridley knew, and of course
the young man knew it too.

We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in
the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the knight's
zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to ourselves we
are not after the thing coveted. Put a lump of sugar in a canary-bird's
cage, and the small creature will illustrate the instinct for the
benefit of inquirers or sceptics. Byles Gridley went to the other side
of the room and took a volume of Reports from the shelves. He put it
back and took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent Remainders," and looked at
that for a moment in an idling way, as if fr