as to how to divide his means.  Nor could he reconcile himself to a division at all, preferring, as the greatly lesser evil, the alternative of destinating his fortune all of a lump, with some hope of its being kept together.  As for Walter, though he had some affection for him, he had not much confidence in him, for he had seen that he was hare-brained as regarded things which suited his fancy, and pig-brained as respected those which solicited and required sound judgment; while Rachel, again, was everything which, among the lower angels, could be comprehended under the delightful title of “dear soul,” an amiable and devoted creature, as stedfast in her affections as she was wise in the selection of their objects.  So by revolving in his mind all the beauties of the character of her who, however disqualified by law, was still of his flesh and blood, yea, of his very nature, as he complacently thought in compliment to himself, he became more and more reconciled to his intention, if the very thought of making a will, which had been horrible to him, did not become even a pleasing kind of meditation.  So is it—­when Nature imposes an inevitable duty, she gives man the power of inventing a pleasing reason for his obedience; nay, so much of a self-dissembler is he, that he even cheats himself into the belief that his obedience is an act of his own will.  In all which he at least proved the value of one of the arguments in favour of marriage; for trite it is to say, a bachelor bears to no one a love which reconciles him to will-making, while a father, in leaving his means to his children, feels as if he were giving to himself.  But this plan of our merchant-burgess had in addition a spice of ingenuity in it which still more pleased him—­he would so contrive matters that the daughter and the nephew would become, after his death, man and wife.  He had only some doubts how far their tastes agreed,—­probably an absurd condition, in so much as we all know that love is often struck out by opposition, and that there is a pleasant suitability in a husband preferring the head of a herring, and the wife the tail.

Having thus arrived at a sense of his duty by the pleasant path of his affection, Mr. David Grierson seized the first opportunity which presented itself of sounding the heart of Rachel, in order to know in what direction her affections ran.  Sitting in his big chair, all so comfortably cushioned by the hands of the said Rachel herself, and with a good fire alongside, due also to her unremitting care, he called her to him, and placing his arm round her waist, as he was often in the habit of doing, said to her—­

“Rachel, dear, I feel day by day my strength leaving me, and it may be, nay, will be, that I will not be very much longer with you.”

Rachel looked at him for a little, but said nothing, for, as the saying goes, her heart came to her mouth, and she could not have spoken even if she would; but the father understood all this, and preferred the mute expression of a real grief to a hysterical burst—­of which, indeed, her calm genial nature was incapable.