AMONG the many letters and papers which Mr. Morton, of the great East India House of Morton and Scraggs, found upon the table of his counting house, when he reached it one morning, about a twelvemonth ago, was a pacquet, sealed with black, which had come by a ship that arrived in the river the evening before from Madras. The pacquet, on being opened, proved to be the announcement of the sudden death, from cholera, of Colonel Gathergold, whose will was in Mr. Morton's possession: sundry papers and accounts were also enclosed to him, as the executor of the deceased gentleman. In the multiplicity of Mr. Morton's business, he had quite forgotten that some three years before, he had assented to the request of Colonel Gathergold, who was then in England, to be nominated his executor, and to take charge of his will. He knew very little of the colonel, except that he was excessively rich, and had had some large transactions with his firm, which made Mr. Morton unwilling to decline an office that he would rather have been spared. The more immediate business of the morning having been despatched, and various letters handed over to various clerks, to be dealt with according to the exact and methodical rules established fifty-five years before by Sir Hammond Scraggs, alderman, and founder of the firm, which had been ever since most religiously adhered to, even to the very shape in which the said letters were folded up, and the manner they were ticketed, Mr. Morton caused his dark iron safe to be explored for the papers of Colonel Gathergold. The chief clerk, after due time spent in deliberate search-for he was a man who piqued himself upon never being in a hurry-found the small tin box, duly labelled with the colonel's name, and some hieroglyphics thereto attached, which pointed out the drawer and compartment where the key was

to be found. The box contained the will and a schedule of the property of the deceased colonel. The former paper divided all his property, save what he might otherwise dispose of by codicils, equally between his two nephews, Philip and Edward Harrington-the latter indicated that the property so divided amounted to upwards of two hundred thousand pounds. To the will there were two codicils; one bequeathing a thousand pounds to his executor, whom the colonel must have known to be very wealthy, and to whom he had never spoken ten words in his life, except on affairs of business; the other, having all the form of a bequest, to a natural daughter, described as being at a boarding school near Bath, but with a fatal blank left for the sum. The papers sent home from Madras contained nothing to supply this omission. Whether Colonel Gathergold had forgotten it, or had been carried off too quickly to allow of his making arrangements, which he would have made if longer warning had been permitted him, could not now be told— it was only certain that an enormously wealthy father had, by neglect or by design, left his child absolutely destitute.

Mr. Morton was every inch a gentleman, and had a warm heart and a liberal hand. "This will be a troublesome, and a painful business too," he said to himself; "but, at all events, the poor girl shall have the executor's share. I shall touch none of it, when one that has so much a more natural claim is left pennyless. But who are these nephews, Mr. Softalk," he continued aloud, speaking to his chief clerk, "can you tell me anything about two nephews of Colonel Gathergold, whose names are both Harringtonbrothers, I suppose ?"

"Not brothers, Sir," replied Mr. Softalk, whose delight was to know all about the private affairs of every one he had ever come in contact with,