Underlying this imperative injunction of James Sedgwick was plainly discernible the motive that prompted it.

In almost so many words he declared that his heir should not receive the fortune if he possessed a single penny that had come to him, in any shape or form, from the man he hated, Edwin Peter Brewster.

While Sedgwick could not have known at the time of his death that the banker had bequeathed one million dollars to his grandson, it was more than apparent that he expected the young man to be enriched liberally by his enemy.

It was to preclude any possible chance of the mingling of his fortune with the smallest portion of Edwin P.Brewster's that James Sedgwick, on his deathbed, put his hand to this astonishing instrument.
There was also a clause in which he undertook to dictate the conduct of Montgomery Brewster during the year leading up to his twenty-sixth anniversary.

He required that the young man should give satisfactory evidence to the executor that he was capable of managing his affairs shrewdly and wisely,--that he possessed the ability to add to the fortune through his own enterprise; that he should come to his twenty-sixth anniversary with a fair name and a record free from anything worse than mild forms of dissipation; that his habits be temperate; that he possess nothing at the end of the year which might be regarded as a "visible or invisible asset"; that he make no endowments; that he give sparingly to charity; that he neither loan nor give away money, for fear that it might be restored to him later; that he live on the principle which inspires a man to "get his money's worth," be the expenditure great or small.