e is Sarah Jones, living in it, and
offers her forty thousand dollars for her real estate. She accepts. His
lawyer searches the title and finds that Sarah Jones is the owner of
record. The old lady is invited to the lawyer's office, executes a
warranty deed, and goes off with the forty thousand dollars. Now in a
great number of instances no one really knows whether the aged dame is
Sarah Jones or not; and she perhaps may be, and sometimes is, only the
caretaker's second cousin, who is looking after the house in the
latter's absence.

There are thousands of acres of land and hundreds of millions of money
waiting at compound interest to be claimed by unknown heirs or next of
kin. Even if the real ones cannot be found one would think that this
defect could be easily supplied by some properly ingenious person.

"My Uncle Bill went to sea in '45 and was never heard from again. Will
you find out if he left any money?" wrote a client to the author.
Careful search failed to reveal any money. But if the money had been
found _first_ how easy it would have been to turn up a nephew! Yet the
industry of producing properly authenticated nephews, heirs, legatees,
next of kin and claimants of all sorts has never been adequately
developed. There are plenty of "agents" who for a moderate fee will
inform you whether or not there is a fortune waiting for you, but there
is no agency within the writer's knowledge which will supply an heir for
every fortune. From a business point of view the idea seems to have
possibilities.

Some few years after the Civil War a Swede named Ebbe Petersen emigrated
to this country to better his condition. Fortune smiled upon him and he
amassed a modest bank account, which, with considerable foresight, he
invested in a large tract of unimproved land in the region known as "The
Bronx," New York City.

In the summer of 1888 Petersen determined to take a vacation and revisit
Sweden, and accordingly deeded all his real estate to his wife. Just
before starting he decided to take his wife and only child, a little
girl of ten or twelve, with him. Accordingly they set sail from Hoboken
Saturday, August 11, upon the steamer _Geiser_, of the Thingvalla Line,
bound for Copenhagen. At four o'clock Tuesday morning, at a point thirty
miles south of Sable Island and two hundred miles out of Halifax, the
_Geiser_, in the midst of a thick fog, crashed suddenly into a sister
ship, the _Thingvalla_, of the same line, and sank