"Only by deed indented, and enrolled within six months after execution, and to take effect immediately," replied the attorney.
"By which you mean, I suppose, that I must give it out and out, slap bang all at once, and pass it right away in the same way as if I sold it outright?"
Lawyer Grapple replied in the affirmative; at which information his client got very red in the face, and exclaimed, with considerable warmth—"Before I do that, I'd see all the charities in ——" he didn't say where; and, checking himself suddenly, continued, in a milder tone—"That is, I could hardly be expected to make so great a sacrifice as that in my lifetime; so, as I can't dispose of my lands in the way I wish, I'll tie 'em up from being made away with as long as I can: for having neither wife, chick, nor child, nor any one living soul as I care a single farthing about, it's no pleasure to me to leave it to any body; but howsomever, as relations is in some shape, as the saying is, after a manner a part of one's own self, I suppose I'd better leave it to one of they."
"Your nephew who resides in Mortimer Street, is, I believe, your heir-at-law?" suggested Mr Grapple.
"He be blowed!" retorted the timber-merchant, petulantly; "he gave me the cut t'other day in Lunnun streets, for which I cuts he off with a shilling. Me make he my heir!—see he doubly hanged first, and wouldn't do it then."
The attorney next mentioned another nephew, who had been a major in the East India Company's service, and was then resident at Southampton.
"He!" vociferated the uncle, "a proud blockhead; I heerd of his goings on. He, the son of a hack writer in a lawyer's office! he to be the one, of all others, to be proposing that all the lawyers and doctors should be excluded from the public balls! I've a-heerd of his goings on. He have my property! Why, he'd blush to own who gid it to him. He have it! No; I'd rather an earthquake swallowed up every acre of it, before a shovel-full should come to his share."
"Then your other nephew at Exeter?" observed the attorney.
"Dead and buried, and so purvided for," said the timber-merchant.
"I beg your pardon, sir—I had for the moment forgotten that circumstance; but there's his brother, Mr Montague Potts Beverley, of Burton Crescent?"