emember, Mr. Wallingford, that a mortgage sale, legally made,
is a ticklish thing, and the courts do not like to disturb one. This sale
will take place, this day week; and the title once passed, it will not be
so easy a matter to get it repassed. Mr. Wetmore, here, does not look like
a man ready to pay down a thousand dollars."

"We shall not run the risk of letting the title pass. I will buy the
property, myself, if necessary; and should it afterwards appear that the
money has been actually paid, we believe you are sufficiently secure for
principal, interest, and costs."

"You are young in the profession, Mr. Wallingford, and will come to learn
the folly of advancing money for your clients."

"I am not in the profession at all, sir, as you have erroneously supposed,
but am a ship-master; and Mr. Wetmore, or Marble, as he has hitherto been
called, is my mate. Still, we are none the worse provided with the means
of paying a thousand dollars--or twenty of them, should it be necessary."

"No lawyer!" cried Van Tassel, smiling grimly. "A couple of sailors about
to dispute the foreclosure of a mortgage! Famous justice we should get at
your hands, gentlemen! Well, well; I now see how it is, and that this has
only been an attempt to work on my sympathies for an old woman who has
been living on my money these twenty years. I rather think your $963.42,
will prove to be of the same quality as your law."

"And, yet, it struck me, Mr. Van Tassel, that you rather disliked the idea
of swearing to the truth of an answer to a certain bill in Chancery,
which, if I cannot draw, one Abraham Van Vechten, of Albany, can!"

"Abraham Van Vechten is skilful counsel, and an honest man, and is riot
likely to be employed in a cause that rests only on an old woman's
_hearsays_--and all to save her own farm!"

Marble could keep silence no longer. He told me afterwards, that, during
the dialogue, he had been taking the measure of the old usurer's foot, and
felt it would be a disgrace to strike so feeble a creature; but, to sit
and hear his newly-found mother sneered at, and her just rights derided,
was more than his patience could endure. Rising abruptly, therefore, he
broke out at once in one of the plainest philippics of the sea. I shall
not repeat all he said; for, to render it justly, might be to render it
offensive; but, in addition to calling old Van Tassel by a great many
names that were as unusual as they were quaint, he called him by s