HALF A MILLION OF MONEY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "BARBARA'S HISTORY."
PROLOGUE. A.D. 1760.

JACOB TREFALDEN, merchant and alderman of
London, lay dying in an upper chamber of his
house in Basinghall-street, towards evening on
the third day of April, Anno Domini seventeen
hundred and sixty.

It was growing rapidly dusk. The great
house was full of gloom, and silence, and the
shadow of death. Two physicians occupied two
easy-chairs before the fire in the sick man's
chamber. They were both notabilities in their
day. The one was Sir John Pringle, Physician
Extraordinary to the King—a brave and skilful
man who had smelt powder at Dettingen, and
won the soldiers' hearts by his indomitable
coolness under fire. The other was Doctor Joshua
Ward, commonly called "Spot Ward" from his
rubicund face; and immortalised by Hogarth
in that bitter caricature called The Company of
Undertakers.

These gentlemen did little in the way of
conversation. When they spoke at all, it was
in a whisper. Now and then, they compared
their watches with the timepiece on the mantelshelf.
Now and then, they glanced towards the
bed where, propped almost upright with pillows,
an old man was sinking gradually out of life.
There was something very ghastly in that old
man's face, purple-hued, unconscious, and
swathed in wet bandages. His eyes were
closed. His lips were swollen. His breathing
was slow and stertorous. He had been smitten
down that day at noon by a stroke of apoplexy;
was carried home from 'Change in a dying state;
and had not spoken since. His housekeeper
crouched by his bedside, silent and awestruck.
His three sons and his lawyer waited in the
drawing-room below. They all knew that he had
not two more hours to live.

In the mean time the dusk thickened, and the
evening stillness grew more and more oppressive.
A chariot rumbled past from time to time, or a
newsvendor trudged by, hawking the London
Gazette, and proclaiming the sentence just
passed on Lord George Sackville. Sometimes
a neighbour's footboy came to the door with a
civil inquiry; or a little knot of passengers
loitered on the opposite pavement, and glanced
up, whisperingly, at the curtained windows.
By-and-by, even these ceased to come and go.
A few oil-lamps were lighted at intervals along
the dingy thoroughfare, and the stars and the
watchmen came out together.

"In the name of Heaven," said Captain
Trefalden, "let us have lights!"—and rang the
drawing-room bell.

Candles were brought, and the heavy damask
curtains were drawn. Captain Trefalden took
up the Gazette; Frederick Trefalden looked at
himself in the glass, arranged the folds of his
cravat, yawned, took snuff, and contemplated the
symmetry of his legs; William Trefalden drew his
chair to the table, and began abstractedly turning
over the leaves of the last Idler. There were
other papers and books on the table as well—
among them a little volume called Rasselas, from
the learned pen of Mr. Samuel Johnson (he was
not yet LL.D.), and the two first volumes of
Tristram Shandy, written by that ingenious
gentleman, the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Both
works were already popular, though published
only a few months before.

These three brothers were curiously alike, and
curiously unlike. They all resembled their father;
they were all fine men; and they were all good-
looking. Old Jacob was a Cornish man, had been
fair and stalwart in his youth, and stood five
feet eleven without his shoes. Captain Trefalden
was not so fair; Frederick Trefalden was not so
tall; William Trefalden was neither so fair, nor
so tall, nor so handsome; and yet they were all
like him, and like each other.

Captain Jacob was the eldest. His father had
intended him for his own business; but, somehow
or another, the lad never took kindly to
indigo. He preferred scarlet—especially scarlet
turned up with buff—and he went into the army.
Having led a roving, irregular youth; sown his
wild oats in various congenial European soils;
and fought gallantly at Dettingen, Fontenoy,
Laffeldt, and Minden, he had now, at forty
years of age, committed the unspeakable folly of
marrying for neither rank nor money, but only
for love. His father had threatened to disinherit
Captain Trefalden for this misdeed, and,
for five months past, had forbidden him the
house. His brothers were even more indignant
than their father—or had seemed to be so. In
short, this was the first occasion on which the