Temptation

The business was brought to me. The merchant who brought it, and who
had been busy for some years in tracing out the testimony, so far
as it could be procured, gave me to understand that he had determined
to place it in my hands for two reasons: firstly, to enable me
to release the memory of my father from the imputation--under any
circumstances discreditable--of bankruptcy, by compelling my uncle
to disgorge the sums which he had appropriated, and which, as was
alleged, would satisfy all my father's creditors; and, secondly,
to give me an opportunity of revenging my own wrongs upon one, of
whose course of conduct toward me the populace had already seen
enough, during the last election, to have a tolerably correct idea.

I examined the papers, thanked my client for his friendly intentions,
but declined taking charge of the case for two other reasons. My
relations to the dead and to the living were either of them sufficient
reasons for this determination. I communicated the grounds of
action, in a respectful letter, to my uncle, and soon discovered,
by the alarm which he displayed in consequence, that the cause
of the complaint was in all probability good. The case belonged to
the equity jurisdiction, and the relator soon filed his bill.

My uncle's tribulation may be conjectured from the fact that
he called upon me, and seemed anxious enough to bury the hatchet.
He wished me to take part in the proceedings--insisted, somewhat
earnestly, and strove very hard to impress me with the conviction
that my father's memory demanded that I should devote myself to the
task of meeting and confounding the creditor who thus, as it were,
had set to work to rake up the ashes of the dead; but I answered
all this very briefly and very dryly:-"If my father has participated in this fraud, he has reaped none
of its pleasant fruits. He lived poor, and died poor. The public
know that; and it will be difficult to persuade them, with a due
knowledge of these facts, that he deliberately perpetrated such
unprofitable villany. Besides, sir, you do not seem to remember
that, if the claim of Banks, Tressell, & Sons, is good, it relieves
my father's memory of the only imputation that now lies against
it--that of being a bankrupt."