land--and
incidentally he was very human. If he had been in a position to
realize all his assets and go to America with the ready money, his
wealth was such that even amid the luxurious society of Pittsburg he
could have cut quite a figure for some time. He owned a great deal of
the land between Oxford Street and Regent Street, and again a number
of the valuable squares north of Oxford Street were his, and as for
Edgware Road--just as auctioneers advertise a couple of miles of
trout-stream or salmon-river as a pleasing adjunct to a country
estate, so, had Lord Woldo's estate come under the hammer, a couple of
miles of Edgware Road might have been advertised as among its charms.
Lord Woldo owned four theatres, and to each theatre he had his
private entrance and in each theatre his private box, over which the
management had no sway. The Woldos in their leases had always insisted
on this.

He never built in London; his business was to let land for others
to build upon, the condition being that what others built should
ultimately belong to him. Thousands of people in London were only
too delighted to build on these terms; he could pick and choose
his builders. (The astute Edward Henry himself, for example, wanted
furiously to build for him, and was angry because obstacles stood in
the path of his desire.) It was constantly happening that under legal
agreements some fine erection put up by another hand came into the
absolute possession of Lord Waldo without one halfpenny of expense to
Lord Woldo. Now and then a whole street would thus tumble all complete
into his hands. The system, most agreeable for Lord Woldo and about a
dozen other landlords in London, was called the leasehold system; and
when Lord Woldo became the proprietor of some bricks and mortar that
had cost him nothing, it was said that one of Lord Woldo's leases had
"fallen in," and everybody was quite satisfied by this phrase.

In the provinces, besides castles, forests and moors, Lord Woldo owned
many acres of land under which was coal, and he allowed enterprising
persons to dig deep for this coal, and often explode themselves
to death in the adventure, on the understanding that they paid him
sixpence for every ton of coal brought to the surface, whether they
made any profit on it or not. This arrangement was called "mining
rights," another phrase that apparently satisfied everybody.

It might be thought that Lord Woldo was, as they say, on velvet.
But the