who confidently affirm that her father said often to her, ’Behold now I am a man stricken in years, and the man Meadows is rich’; so the maiden gave her hand to the man, but whether to please the old man her father, or out of the folly and weakness of females, thou, O Isaac, son of Shadrach, shalt determine; seeing that I am young, and little versed in the ways of women, knowing this only by universal report, that they are fair to the eye but often bitter to the taste.”

“Aha!” cried Isaac, “but I am old, O Nathan, son of Eli, and with the thorns of old age comes one good fruit, ‘experience.’  No letters came to him, yet she wrote many.  None came to her, yet he wrote many.  All this is transparent as glass—­here has been fraud as well as guile.”

Nathan’s eye sparkled.  “What is the fraud, master?”

“Nay, that I know not, but I will know!”

“But how, master?”

“By help of thine ears, or my own!”

Nathan looked puzzled.  So long as Mr. Levi shut himself up a close prisoner on the first floor what could he hear for himself?

Isaac read the look and smiled.  He then rose, and, putting his finger to his lips, led the way to his own apartments.  At the staircase-door, which even Nathan had not yet passed, he bade the young man take off his shoes; he himself was in slippers.  He took Nathan into a room, the floor of which was entirely covered with mattresses.  A staircase, the steps of which were covered with horsehair, went by a tolerably easy slope and spiral movement nearly up to the cornice.  Of this cornice a portion about a foot square swung back on a well-oiled hinge, and Isaac drew out from the wall with the utmost caution a piece of gutta-percha piping, to this he screwed on another piece open at the end, and applied it to his ear.

Nathan comprehended it all in a moment.  His master could overhear every word uttered in Meadows’ study.  Levi explained to him that ere he left his old house he had put a new cornice in the room he thought Meadows would sit in, a cornice so deeply ornamented that no one could see the ear he left in it, and had taken out bricks in the wall of the adjoining house and made the other arrangements they were inspecting together.  Mr. Levi further explained that his object was simply to overhear and counteract every scheme Meadows should form.  He added that he never intended to leave Farnborough for long.  His intention had been to establish certain relations in that country, buy some land, and return immediately; but the gold discovery had detained him.

“But, master,” said Nathan, “suppose the man had taken his business to the other side of his house?”

“Foolish youth,” replied Isaac, “am I not on both sides of him!!”

“Ah!  What, is there another on the other?” Isaac nodded.

Thus, while Nathan was collecting facts, Isaac had been watching, “patient as a cat, keen as a lynx,” at his ear-hole, and heard—­nothing.