CHAPTER I.
THE OLDEST INHABITANT.
Black Swan Inn, Ullerton, October 2nd.
As the work I am now employed in is quite new to me, and I am to keep Sheldon posted up in this business day by day, I have decided on jotting down the results of my inquiries in a kind of diary.

Instead of writing my principal a formal letter, I shall send a copy of the entries in the diary, revised and amended.

This will insure exactitude; and there is just the possibility that the record may be useful to me hereafter.

To remember all I hear and pick up about these departed Haygarths without the aid of pen and ink would be out of the question; so I mean to go in for unlimited pen and ink like a hero, not to say a martyr.
And I am to do all this for twenty shillings a week, and the remote possibility of three thousand pounds! O genius, genius! in all the markets of this round world is there no better price for you than that?
How sweetly my Charlotte looked at me yesterday, when I told her I was going away! If I could have dared to kneel at her feet under those whispering elms,--unconscious of the children, unconscious of the nursemaids,--if I could have dared to cry aloud to her, "I am a penniless reprobate, but I love you; I am a disreputable pauper, but I adore you! Have pity upon my love and forget my worthlessness!" If I could have dared to carry her away from her prim suburban home and that terrible black-whiskered stockbroking stepfather! But how is a man to carry off the woman he adores when he has not the _de quoi_ for the first stage of the journey?
With three thousand pounds in my pocket, I think I could dare anything.
Three thousand pounds! One year of splendour and happiness, and then--the rest is chaos! I have seen the oldest inhabitant.

_Ay de mi_! Sheldon did not exaggerate the prosiness of that intolerable man.