n
our family. He must have been a reversal to a very, very ancient type;
a type of which we have no record. He was as miserly as his
forefathers were prodigal. When he came into the title and estate some
twenty years ago, he dismissed the whole retinue of servants, and,
indeed, was defendant in several cases at law where retainers of our
family brought suit against him for wrongful dismissal, or dismissal
without a penny compensation in lieu of notice. I am pleased to say he
lost all his cases, and when he pleaded poverty, got permission to
sell a certain number of heirlooms, enabling him to make compensation,
and giving him something on which to live. These heirlooms at auction
sold so unexpectedly well, that my uncle acquired a taste, as it were,
of what might be done. He could always prove that the rents went to
the mortgagees, and that he had nothing on which to exist, so on
several occasions he obtained permission from the courts to cut timber
and sell pictures, until he denuded the estate and made an empty barn
of the old manor house. He lived like any labourer, occupying himself
sometimes as a carpenter, sometimes as a blacksmith; indeed, he made a
blacksmith's shop of the library, one of the most noble rooms in
Britain, containing thousands of valuable books which again and again
he applied for permission to sell, but this privilege was never
granted to him. I find on coming into the property that my uncle quite
persistently evaded the law, and depleted this superb collection, book
by book, surreptitiously through dealers in London. This, of course,
would have got him into deep trouble if it had been discovered before
his death, but now the valuable volumes are gone, and there is no
redress. Many of them are doubtless in America, or in museums and
collections of Europe.'

'You wish me to trace them, perhaps?' I interpolated.

'Oh, no; they are past praying for. The old man made tens of thousands
by the sale of the timber, and other thousands by disposing of the
pictures. The house is denuded of its fine old furniture, which was
immensely valuable, and then the books, as I have said, must have
brought in the revenue of a prince, if he got anything like their
value, and you may be sure he was shrewd enough to know their worth.
Since the last refusal of the courts to allow him further relief, as
he termed it, which was some seven years ago, he had quite evidently
been disposing of books and furniture by a private