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.