The large creditors were silent—­Quigg veiling his dissatisfaction under a look of complete misanthropy—­but the small ones, headed by Rickarts, the shoemaker, highly commended it.

“Besides,” added a butter man, who had originally been in the mock-auction line, “don’t ye see, we can all stay at the auction, and kind o’ bid on the things.  Hey?” The butter man nodded at the lesser creditors.

The idea took; only a few of the larger creditors holding out against it.

“My friends,” again observed Matthew, drawing on his stores of legal knowledge, “you seem to forget that, if my client chose to resist your claims, he could retain a large amount of furniture as household articles under the law, which exempts certain necessary things.  But, with rare magnanimity, he gives up all.”

The allusion to magnanimity produced some derisive laughs, which slightly nettled Matthew.

“Auction it off,” said he, “or we throw ourselves back on our reserved rights.”

At this hint, everybody gave in; and a committee, consisting of Quigg, Rickarts, and the butter man, was appointed to make all the arrangements for an immediate sale.

It is not pleasant to pursue this painful theme—­the decline and fall of the Whedell household—­farther.  Let the historian barely record, that the sale attracted a large crowd, and that, by the ingenious side bids of the creditors, the furniture was run up to twice its original value (no uncommon thing at auctions); that the creditors, large and small, were well satisfied with the results; that Mr. Whedell and daughter moved to Boston, and became stipendiaries upon a younger brother, who had made a fortune in the upholstery business, and whom Mr. Whedell had always despised; that Mr. Chiffield took to drink tenaciously in consequence of his misfortunes, and never saw or sought after his wife from the day when he discovered that she was dowerless; that Mrs. Chiffield obtained a divorce from the bonds of matrimony, but had not married again at last accounts; and that Matthew Maltboy, Esq., on looking over the whole episode of his acquaintance with the Whedells thanked his stars that he had got out of their entanglements on the reasonable terms of three hundred dollars.

BOOK ELEVENTH.

DISCOVERIES.

CHAPTER I.

THE OLD HOUSE REVISITED.

In the month that followed the acquittal of Marcus Wilkeson, three real murders, a railway collision killing thirty persons, and a steamboat explosion almost as tragical in its results, occurred.  The Minford affair was already getting old.  Public curiosity, except in the immediate neighborhood of the house, no longer exercised itself upon the problem which all of Coroner Bullfast’s powers of analysis had failed to solve.