“Bless me,” interrupts the old man, confusedly, “but off my little things it will be hard to raise it.  Times is hard, our people go, like geese, to the North.  They get rid of all their money there, and their fancy-you know that, Mr. Snivel-is abroad, while they have, for home, only a love to keep up slavery.”

“I thought it would come to that,” says Mr. Snivel, facetiously.  The antiquarian seems bewildered, commences offering excuses that rather involve himself deeper, and finally concludes by pleading for a delay.  Scarce any one would have thought a person of Mr. McArthur’s position, indebted to Mr. Keepum; but so it was.  It is very difficult to tell whose negroes are not mortgaged to Mr. Keepum, how many mortgages of plantation he has foreclosed, how many high old families he has reduced to abject poverty, or how many poor but respectable families he has disgraced.  He has a reputation for loaning money to parents, that he may rob their daughters of that jewel the world refuses to give them back.  And yet our best society honor him, fawn over him, and bow to him.  We so worship the god of slavery, that our minds are become debased, and yet we seem unconscious of it.  Mr. Keepum did not lend money to the old antiquarian without a purpose.  That purpose, that justice which accommodates itself to the popular voice, will aid him in gaining.

Mr. Snivel affects a tone of moderation, whispers in the old man’s ear, and says:  “Mind you tell the fortune of this girl, Bonard, as I have directed.  Study what I have told you.  If she be not the child of Madame Montford, then no faith can be put in likenesses.  I have got in my possession what goes far to strengthen the suspicions now rife concerning the fashionable New Yorker.”

“There surely is a mystery about this woman, Mr. Snivel, as you say.  She has so many times looked in here to inquire about Mag Munday, a woman in a curious line of life who came here, got down in the world, as they all do, and used now and then to get the loan of a trifle from me to keep her from starvation.” (Mr. Snivel says, in parentheses, he knows all about her.)

“Ha! ha! my old boy,” says Mr. Snivel, frisking his fingers through his light Saxon beard, “I have had this case in hand for some time.  It is strictly a private matter, nevertheless.  They are a bad lot-them New Yorkers, who come here to avoid their little delicate affairs.  I may yet make a good thing out of this, though.  As for that fellow, Mullholland, I intend getting him the whipping post.  He is come to be the associate of gentlemen; men high in office shower upon him their favors.  It is all to propitiate the friendship of Bonard-I know it.”  Mr. Snivel concludes hurriedly, and departs into the street, as our scene changes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Anna Bonard seeks an interview with the antiquary.