them having their minds bent on a
limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. The
long-recognised blood-relations and connections by marriage made already a
goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range for
jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness. Jealousy of the Vincys had created
a fellowship in hostility among all persons of the Featherstone blood, so that
in the absence of any decided indication that one of themselves was to have more
than the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy should have the land
was necessarily dominant, though it left abundant feeling and leisure for vaguer
jealousies, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth. Solomon found time to
reflect that Jonah was undeserving, and Jonah to abuse Solomon as greedy; Jane,
the elder sister, held that Martha's children ought not to expect so much as the
young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject of primogeniture, was sorry to
think that Jane was so »having.« These nearest of kin were naturally impressed
with the unreasonableness of expectations in cousins and second cousins, and
used their arithmetic in reckoning the large sums that small legacies might
mount to, if there were too many of them. Two cousins were present to hear the
will, and a second cousin besides Mr. Trumbull. This second cousin was a
Middlemarch mercer of polite manners and superfluous aspirates. The two cousins
were elderly men from Brassing, one of them conscious of claims on the score of
inconvenient expense sustained by him in presents of oysters and other eatables
to his rich cousin Peter; the other entirely saturnine, leaning his hands and
chin on a stick, and conscious of claims based on no narrow performance but on
merit generally: both blameless citizens of Brassing, who wished that Jonah
Featherstone did not live there. The wit of a family is usually best received
among strangers.
    »Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred - that you may depend,
- I shouldn't wonder if my brother promised him,« said Solomon, musing aloud
with his sisters, the evening before the funeral.
    »Dear, dear!« said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds had
been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.
    But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were disturbed by
the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among them as if from the
moon. This was the stranger described by Mrs. Cadwallader as frog-faced: a man
perhaps about two or three and thirty, whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped,
downward-curved mouth, and