"I don't think Mr. Sheldon ever saw Mr. Grewter in his life," I said.

After this the clerk condescended to retire into the unknown antres behind the shop, to deliver my message. I began to think that George Sheldon's card was not the best possible letter of introduction.

The clerk returned presently, followed by a tall, white-bearded man, with a bent figure, and a pair of penetrating gray eyes—a very promising specimen of the octogenarian.

He asked me my business in a sharp suspicious way, that obliged me to state the nature of my errand without circumlocution. As I got farther away from the Rev. John Haygarth, intestate, I was less fettered by the necessity of secrecy. I informed my octogenarian that I was prosecuting a legal investigation connected with a late inhabitant of that street, and that I had taken the liberty to apply to him, in the hope that he might be able to afford me some information.

He looked at me all the time I spoke as if he thought I was going to entreat pecuniary relief—and I daresay I have something the air of a begging-letter writer. But when he found that I only wanted information, his hard gray eyes softened ever so little, and he asked me to walk into his parlour.

His parlour was scarcely less gruesome than his shop. The furniture looked as if its manufacture had been coeval with the time of the Meynells, and the ghastly glare of the gas seemed a kind of anachronism. After a few preliminary observations, which were not encouraged by Mr. Grewter's manner, I inquired whether he had ever heard the name of Meynell.

"Yes," he said; "there was a Meynell in this street when I was a young man—Christian Meynell, a carpet-maker by trade. The business is still carried on—and a very old business it is, for it was an old business in Meynell's time; but Meynell died before I married, and his name is pretty well forgotten in Aldersgate-street by this time."

"Had he no sons?" I asked.

"Well, yes; he had one son, Samuel, a kind of companion of mine. But he didn't take to the business, and when his father died he let things go anyhow, as you may say. He was rather wild, and died two or three years after his father."

"Did he die unmarried?"

"Yes. There was some talk of his marrying a Miss Dobberly, whose father was a cabinet-maker in Jewin-street; but Samuel was too wild for the Dobberlys, who were steady-going people, and he went abroad, where he was taken with some kind of fever and died."

"Was this son the only child?"

"No; there were two daughters. The younger of them married; the elder went to live with her—and died unmarried, I've heard say."

"Do you know whom the younger sister married?" I asked.