"But to provide against any possibility of your fortunes going awry, I have decided to make you my heir; therefore--stop a moment, please; I think I can guess what you would say--that you positively refuse to have anything whatever to do with wealth acquired by robbery and murder. Quite right, my dear boy, it is precisely what I should expect--ay, and wish--you to say.  But when I was an Englishman I sometimes used to hear people say that `circumstances alter cases'; and this is one of them. The wealth that I propose to bequeath to you has not been acquired by me through any objectionable practices, it came to me through the merest accident, and nobody is aware of its existence save Lotta and myself. If it is indeed a pirate hoard, as is not at all unlikely, there is nothing to prove that such is the case; nor, assuming for the moment that it is so, is there anything to tell us either the name of the pirate who got it together, or the names of those from whom he took it. And, in any case, if it is the spoils of a pirate gang, they must have operated about a hundred years ago; and since they are now all undoubtedly dead and gone, as also are those from whom it was taken, you have as much right to it as anybody, and may as well have it.  Lotta will show you where it lies concealed; and, since I shall never make use of it, you are at liberty to help yourself to the whole of it as soon as you please.