ur
family tree now," he added; "I fear I haven't the head for it. I'll try
some day--if it will bear my weight; or yours added to mine. There's
no doubt, however, that we, as they say, go back. But I know nothing of
business. If I were to take the matter in hand I should break in two the
poor little silken thread from which everything hangs. In a better world
than this I think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn't set to
ideal justice. There's no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered
a palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust of a
century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!"

"What then," I asked, "is the estimated value of your interest?"

"We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise. Compared with
the whole property our ideas have been small. We were once advised in
the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Why a hundred and
thirty I'm sure I don't know. Don't beguile me into figures."

"Allow me one more question," I said. "Who's actually in possession?"

"A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him."

"He's in some way related to you?"

"Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make us?"

"Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin live?"

"At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire."

I thought it over. "Well, suppose we look up Lackley in Middleshire!"

He got straight up. "Go and see it?"

"Go and see it."

"Well," he said, "with you I'll go anywhere."

On our return to town we determined to spend three days there together
and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one as the other of
that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those superstitious pilgrims
who feel it the mother-city of their race, the distributing heart of
their traditional life. Certain characteristics of the dusky Babylon,
certain aspects, phases, features, "say" more to the American spiritual
ear than anything else in Europe. The influence of these things on
Searle it charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as
I pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from long
inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and his talk.

II

We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide, which
spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took up our abode,
our journey ended, at a waysid