Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ham lavished upon its production all their classic skill. It was a white and gold shell, swung by gilded cords from two Italian pillars, and was, they slyly informed her ladyship, in the purest Re-naissance style. Delicate sky-silk hangings subdued by the finest muslin drooped round the' shell; and the Countess used to go and hang over it, and wonder what little form would press the downy bed and satin-like pillow. III.—A Land Slip. The Earl of Ffowlsmere was one of the wealthiest men in the three kingdoms, His possessions in agricultural counties, in mineral districts, in the metropolis—not to mention half the vast manufacturing town of Ironchester—were so enormous and their returns so lucrative, that the public may be forgiven for attributing to him fabulous riches, and entertaining itself with calculations that every second of the. day or night the Earl was receiving a sum equivalent to a respectable man's salary for a year. A clever ancestor of the Earl, duly encouraged and assisted by the laws of these realms, happening, by good luck to him, to possess land that grew in great request for the houses of a pushing population, had been able to grant leases of it to various tenants for just ninety-nine years. In effect, this was to keep the real ownership of the land in abeyance while two or perhaps three generations lived and died, and then, long after the clever old man was in his grave, to cause the immensely enhanced freehold to fall into a person he had never seen, and whom he could only prophetically and vaguely designate as the next heir of some one. It was the merest " fluke,"—if I may use a felicitous vulgarism—that the Earl of Ffowlsmere's father happened to be that fortunate next heir. He had done or conceived of nothing on earth to entitle him to take a...