“‘I think, sir, the matter may be managed if the gentleman does not mind paying a few shillings more. That ticket, 2,224, only came yesterday, and we have still all the shares: one half, one quarter, one eighth, two sixteenths. It will be just the same if the young lady is set upon it.’
“The young lady was set upon it, and the shares were purchased.
“‘The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father, whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty thousand pounds—just like Alnaschar over his basket of eggs.
“Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning a face that I had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had been drawn a prize of twenty thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good news.”
Twenty thousand pounds! Dame Fortune was indeed rewarding the optimist. Dr. Mitford was nothing if not magnanimous, and although he had presented the lottery ticket as a birthday present to his daughter, and although it was due to her persistence only that the winning number, 2,224, had been chosen, he at once claimed the success as his own, and, when informing his friends, added that he should settle the whole amount on his daughter.
No trace of any such settlement can be discovered; if it was made it was speedily annulled and in the course of a very few years it had been all squandered in the Doctor’s own reckless fashion.
“Ah, me!” reflects Miss Mitford. “In less than twenty years what was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What? except a Wedgwood dinner-service that my father had made to commemorate the event with the Irish harp within the border on one side, and his family crest on the other!”
The infinite possibilities of twenty thousand pounds were not lost on the Doctor. Forthwith he moved with his wife, child and few belongings to Reading, then a fairly prosperous and eminently respectable town, swarming “with single ladies of that despised denomination which is commonly known by the title of old maids.”
At the period of which we are now writing its commerce was practically confined to trading in the products of the rural districts surrounding it—principally in malt, corn and flour. Being on the direct coach-road from London to the West of England, it was, naturally, a great and important centre for the carrying trade, as witness whereof the many quaint old inns still standing. An air of prosperity pervaded the streets, for the ancient borough was just beginning to rouse itself from the lethargy into which it had drifted when its staple trade, the manufacture of cloth, dwindled and died scarcely a century before.
“Clean, airy, orderly and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses,” is Miss Mitford’s description of it, and she might have added that it was once again comporting itself in the grand manner as was proper to a town whose origin is lost in the mists of antiquity, but whose records, from the twelfth century at least, are records of great doings of both Church and State.