uding
De Beauvoir Town.

In the second generation, his grand-daughters Rachel Martin of the elder
branch and Marie Priaulx of the younger, contended at law for the
inheritance after some intestacy: and a terrible lawsuit raged in
Chancery for 150 years, between the Tuppers and the Benyons,--and was
carried even to the House of Lords, being finally decided in my memory
for the Benyons. I remember my uncle saying he would not take thirty
thousand pounds for his individual chance,--but my less sanguine father
cared not to join in the lawsuit,--saying he would not "throw good
money after bad." For my own judgment, and I can speak as an old
conveyancing barrister (though without business or experience) of nearly
fifty years' standing, our side as the elder had the best right, though
the two sisters might well and wisely have shared in a compromise. But
somehow it came to be decided that the younger claimant of that vast
property must have _all_,--and the elder be strangely left out in the
cold. After the conclusion of the Lords, further litigation was
hopeless: so those whom I now represent (as almost the "last of the
Abruzzi") must acquiesce in getting nothing, while the opponent side has
the good luck to possess, as Dr. Johnson has it, "wealth beyond the
dreams of avarice." Such is life,--and law: the most obstinate and the
richest win: the less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail:
it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest. All this is now
"too late to mend:" but I do hope that if ever I go to Engelfield
Castle, Sir Richard will be kindly and genial to his far-off cousin, who
(but for some legal quibble unknown) might have dispossessed him.

My father numbered among his patients the Duke of Rutland, and I have
heard him say that they half-humorously called each other cousins.

A Lost Chance in Belgravia.

In this connection of possible good luck that never happened, let me
record this.

Another of my father's patients was the long deceased Earl Grosvenor,
grandfather of the present Duke of Westminster; and about him I have a
tale to tell, which shows how nearly we might have been possessed of
another vast property--but we missed it. One day in my boyhood, I
remember my father coming home after his round and telling my mother
that he had a great mind to buy "the five fields" of Lord Grosvenor's,
because he thought London might extend that way. Those five fields are
now covered with the palatial