, and the family income concentrated in his cheque
book. Dick Talbot-Lowry's pigheadedness was at the root of the
downsliding of Mount Music. Having faced, undaunted, deputations of
his tenants; deputations of public bodies; ("Damned interfering
blackguards, who ought to be taught to mind their own business!"),
having made light of advice from his friends, and of anonymous
threatening letters from, presumably, his enemies, he still held fast,
and refused to sell the property that had come to him from the men
whose portraits had looked down on him from the old walls of Mount
Music, all the days of his life. It was, perhaps, the solitary strand
of romance in his nature, the feudal feeling that the Mount Music
tenants were his, as they had been his ancestors', to have and to
hold, to rule, to arbitrate for, and to stand by, as a fond and
despotic husband rules and stands by an obedient wife, loving her and
bullying her (but both entirely for her good). He had, moreover, the
desire to disparage and to disprove new ideas, that is a sign of a
mind incapable of originality, and anxious to assert itself
negatively, since it must otherwise remain silent.

"But Dick," his friends would say, "there isn't a property this side
of the county that isn't sold, except your own!"

"What's that to me?" says Dick, as stubborn and stupid a King Canute
as ever sat with the tide nearing the tops of his hunting-boots; "I
don't care a damn what anybody else does! And what's more," he would
add, gloomily, "_I_ can't afford to sell at seventeen years'
purchase. Anyhow, what's mine's my own! I'll be shot if I'll be
bullied!"

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were!" the friends would reply
darkly.

To sell at seventeen years' purchase, was what Mr. St. Lawrence
Coppinger had done, following the advice of his agent and solicitor,
Mr. Bartholomew Mangan, and his cousin, and late guardian, Major
Talbot-Lowry, had found it hard to forgive him. The business had been
arranged while Larry was in Paris, and the expostulations that might
have prevailed if delivered _viva voce_, failed of their effect
when presented on foreign paper, in Cousin Dick's illegible scrawl. It
was all very fine for Larry, ran the illegible scrawl, to talk of
selling at such a price, but he ought to see what a hole his doing so
put his neighbours in! Larry hadn't a squad of incumbrances, and
charges, and mortgages, hung round his neck like leeches (and no fault
of the M