There remains room, however, for the question, whether, if Mr.Sclater had not been the man to change his course as he did afterwards, he would not have acted differently from the first.
One morning, as he sat at breakfast with his wife, late Mrs.
Bonniman, and cast, as is, I fear, the rude habit of not a few husbands, not a few stolen glances, as he ate, over the morning paper, his eye fell upon a paragraph announcing the sudden death of the well-known William Fuller Withrop, of the eminent ship-building firm of Withrop and Playtell, of Greenock.

Until he came to the end of the paragraph, his cup of coffee hung suspended in mid air.

Then down it went untasted, he jumped from his seat, and hurried from the room.

For the said paragraph ended with the remark, that the not unfrequent incapacity of the ablest of business men for looking the inevitable in the face with coolness sufficient to the making of a will, was not only a curious fact, but in the individual case a pity, where two hundred thousand pounds was concerned.

Had the writer been a little more philosophical still, he might have seen that the faculty for making money by no means involves judgment in the destination of it, and that the money may do its part for good and evil without, just as well as with, a will at the back of it.
But though this was the occasion, it remains to ask what was the cause of the minister's precipitancy.