dge for yourself
whether it deserved any. Freeman Hynds, riding about the plantation
after his habit, was thrown from his horse and died from the
injuries sustained. He recovered consciousness for a few minutes
before he died; some said he never really regained it. Be that as it
may, the dying man cried out, in a voice of great anguish and
affliction: '_Richard! Brother Richard! The jewels--the jewels!_' He
struggled to say more, and failed; looked into the concerned faces
around him, with the awful look of the soul about to depart;
struggled to raise himself; and fell back upon his pillow a corpse.

"Some--they were in the majority--said, sensibly enough, that the
pain and disgrace of his brother's downfall had haunted the poor
gentleman's death-bed, and occasioned that last sad cry. Some few
said he had wished to confess a thing heavy upon his conscience, who
had taken his brother's place as Jacob took Esau's. Richard's wife,
of course, was of these latter. She went to her grave a passionate
believer in the innocence of her husband, whom she averred to have
been a deeply wronged and cruelly used man; and, for heaven's sake,
who do you suppose she claimed had wronged him? Freeman! She
couldn't prove anything; she hadn't the ghost of a clue to hang the
ghost of an accusation upon; yet, womanlike, she clung to her
notion, and she taught it to her son as one teaches a holy creed.

"The Hyndses were excellent haters. Freeman's daughter, born into an
atmosphere of family disruption, abhorred the very memory of her
uncle, and hated her uncle's wife, the woman who doubted and led
others to doubt her father's honesty. This hatred she discovered for
Richard's son, who, as he grew older, referred to Freeman as 'my
Uncle Judas.'

"This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a
man honored and beloved by this community. There was no wildness in
_him_, nor in his son, the third Richard. His granddaughter Sarah
Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese
alienist, whom she met abroad. Your next-door neighbor is Sarah's
son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe. Both the young man's
parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and
irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his
father's profession, to which he was educated.

"My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable
characteristics of the first Richard. She asserted--she allowed