A STRANGE STORY.

BY THE AUTHOR OF " MY NOVEL," " RIENZI," &c.

CHAPTER III.

IT was some time before I could shake off
the impression made on me by the words and
the look of that dying man.

It was not that my conscience upbraided me.
What had I done? Denounced that which I held,
in common with most men of sense in or out of my
profession, to be one of those illusions by which
quackery draws profit from the wonder of
ignorance. Was I to blame if I had refused to
treat with the grave respect due to asserted
discovery in legitimate science pretensions to
powers akin to the fables of wizards? was I to
descend from the Academe of decorous science
to examine whether a slumbering sibyl could read
from a book placed at her back, or tell me at
L—— what at that moment was being done by
my friend at the Antipodes?

And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be
a worthy and honest man, and a sincere believer
in the extravagances for which he demanded an
equal credulity in others, do not honest men
every day incur the penalty of ridicule if, from a
defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous? Could I have foreseen that a
satire so justly provoked would inflict so deadly a
wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because
the antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive?
My conscience, therefore, made me no
reproach, and the public was as little severe as
my conscience. The public had been with me in
our contest—the public knew nothing of my
opponent's death-bed accusations—the public
knew only that I had attended him in his last
moments—it saw me walk beside the bier that
bore him to his grave—it admired the respect to
his memory which I evinced in the simple tomb
that I placed over his remains, inscribed with an
epitaph that did justice to his incontestable
benevolence and integrity:—above all, it praised the
energy with which I set on foot a subscription
for his orphan children, and the generosity with
which I headed that subscription by a sum that
was large in proportion to my means.

To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my
contribution. The sobs of the poor female child rang
still on my heart. As her grief had been keener
than that of her brothers, so she might be
subjected to sharper trials than they, when the time
came for her to fight her own way through the
world: therefore I secured to her, but with such
precautions that the gift could not be traced to
my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was of
marriageable age, and which then might suffice for
a small wedding portion; or, if she remained
single, for an income that would place her beyond
the temptation of want, or the bitterness of a
servile dependence.

That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty
was a matter of surprise at first, for his profits
during the last few years had been considerable,
and his mode of life far from extravagant. But
just before the date of our controversy he had
been induced to assist the brother of his lost wife,
who was a junior partner in a London bank, with
the loan of his accumulated savings. This man
proved dishonest; he embezzled that and other
sums entrusted to him, and fled the country.
The same sentiment of conjugal affection which
had cost Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him silent
as to the cause of the loss. It was reserved for
his executors to discover the treachery of the
brother-in-law whom he, poor man, would have
generously screened from additional disgrace.

The mayor of L——, a wealthy and public-
spirited merchant, purchased the museum, which
Dr. Lloyd's passion for natural history had induced
him to form; and the sum thus obtained, together
with that raised by subscription, sufficed, not only
to discharge all debts due by the deceased, but to
ensure to the orphans the benefits of an education
that might fit at least the boys to enter
fairly armed into that game, more of skill than of
chance, in which Fortune is really so little
blinded that we see, in each turn of her wheel,
wealth and its honours pass away from the lax
fingers of ignorance and sloth to the resolute
grasp of labour and knowledge.

Meanwhile, a relation in a distant county
undertook the charge of the orphans; they
disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the
place which the dead man had occupied in the
thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.

One person at L——, and only one, appeared
to share and inherit the rancour with which the
poor physician had denounced me on his
death-bed. It was a gentleman named Vigors,