WYLDER'S HAJVD.
7
town, where from the table it looked up in my face, with
a broad red seal, and a countenance scarred and marred
all over with various post-marks, erasures, and transverse
directions, the scars and furrows of disappointment and
adventure.
It had not a good countenance, somehow. The origi-
nal lines were not prepossessing. The handwriting I
knew as one sometimes knows a face, without being able
to remember who the plague it belongs to; but, still, with
an unpleasant association about it. I examined it care-
fully, and laid it down unopened. I went through half-
a-dozen others, and recurred to it, and puzzled over its
exterior again, and again postponed what I fancied would
prove a disagreeable discovery; and this happened every
now and again, until I had quite exhausted my budget
and then I did open it, and looked straight to the signa-
ture.
"Pooh! Mark Wylder," I exclaimed, a good deal re-
lieved.
Mark Wylder! Yes, Master Mark could not hurt
me. There was nothing about him to excite the least
uneasiness; on the contrary, I believe he liked me as well
as he was capable of liking anybody, and it was now seven
years since we had met.
I had been his working junior in the cause of Wylder
v. Trustees of Brandon, minor — Dorcas Brandon, his
own cousin. There was a complicated cousinship among
these Brandons, Wylders, and Lakes — inextricable in-
termarriages, which, five years ago, before I renounced
the bar, I had at my fingers' ends, but which had now re-
lapsed into haze. There must have been some damnable
taint in the blood of the common ancestor — a spice of the
insane and the diabolical. They were an ill-conditioned
race — that is to say, every now and then there emerged