And now you'd better have some brandy-and-soda, for what I've got to say will take some time in the saying of it." On this occasion Mr.Hawkehurst accepted the lawyer's hospitality, and there was some little delay before the conversation proceeded.
It was a very long conversation.

Mr.Sheldon produced a bundle of papers, and exhibited some of them to his agent, beginning with that advertisement in the _Times_ which had first attracted his notice, but taking very good care _not_ to show his coadjutor the obituary in the _Observer_, wherein the amount of the intestate's fortune was stated.
The ready wits which had been sharpened at so many different grindstones proved keen enough for the occasion.

Valentine Hawkehurst had had little to do with genealogies or baptismal registers during his past career; but his experiences were of such a manifold nature that he was not easily to be baffled or mystified by any new experience.

He showed himself almost as quick at tracing up the intricacies of a family tree as Mr.Sheldon, the astute attorney and practised genealogist.
"I have traced these Haygarths back to the intestate's great-grandfather, who was a carpenter and a Puritan in the reign of Charles the First.

He seems to have made money--how I have not been able to discover with any certainty; but it is more than probable he served in the civil wars, and came in for some of the plunder those crop-eared, psalm-singing, pierce-the-brain-of-the-tyrant-with-the-nail-of-Jael scoundrels were always in the way of, at the sack of Royalist mansions.