II

IN WHICH THERE IS A FAMILY JAR

While Lynde is enjoying the refreshing sleep that easily overtook him after supper, we will reveal to the reader so much of the young man’s private history as may be necessary to the narrative.  In order to do this, the author, like Deacon Twombly’s mare, feels it indispensable to back a little.

One morning, about three years previous to the day when Edward Lynde set forth on his aimless pilgrimage, Mr. Jenness Bowlsby, the president of the Nautilus Bank at Rivermouth, received the following letter from his wife’s nephew, Mr. John Flemming, a young merchant in New York—­

New York, May 28,1869.

My dear uncle:  In the course of a few days a friend of mine, Mr. Edward Lynde of this city, will call upon you and hand you a note of introduction from myself.  I write this to secure for him in advance the liking and interest which I am persuaded you will not be able to withhold on closer acquaintance.  I have been intimate with Edward Lynde for twelve years or more, first at the boarding-school at Flatbush, and afterwards at college.  Though several years my junior, he was in the same classes with me, and, if the truth must be told, generally carried off all the honors.  He is not only the most accomplished young fellow I know, but a fellow of inexhaustible modesty and amiability, and I think it was singularly malicious of destiny to pick him out as a victim, when there are so many worthless young men (the name of John Flemming will instantly occur to you) who deserve nothing better than rough treatment.  You see, I am taking point-blank aim at your sympathy.

When Lynde was seven or eight years old he had the misfortune to lose his mother; his father was already dead.  The child’s nearest relative was an uncle, David Lynde, a rich merchant of New York, a bachelor, and a character.  Old Lynde—­I call him old Lynde not out of disrespect, but to distinguish him from young Lynde—­was at that period in his sixtieth year, a gentleman of unsullied commercial reputation, and of regular if somewhat peculiar habits.  He was at his counting-room precisely at eight in the morning, and was the last to leave in the evening, working as many hours each day as he had done in those first years when he entered as office-boy into the employment of Briggs & Livingstone—­the firm at the time of which I am now writing was Lynde, Livingstone & Co.  Mr. David Lynde lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian.  A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation.  What is called society saw nothing of him.  He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to apoplexy, enjoying life in his own secluded