A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when he began to die; skins much older than any man's who handled them, and drier than the brains of any lawyer.
"Anno Jacobi tertio, and Quadragesimo Elisabethae! How nice it sounds!" Mr.Jellicorse exclaimed; "they ought all to go in, and be charged for.
People to be satisfied with sixty years' title! Why, bless the Lord, I am sixty-eight myself, and could buy and sell the grammar school at eight years old.

It is no security, no security at all.

What did the learned Bacupiston say--'If a rogue only lives to be a hundred and eleven, he may have been for ninety years disseized, and nobody alive to know it!'" Older and older grew the documents as the lawyer's hand travelled downward; any flaw or failure must have been healed by lapse of time long and long ago; dust and grime and mildew thickened, ink became paler, and contractions more contorted; it was rather an antiquary's business now than a lawyer's to decipher them.
"What a fool I am!" the solicitor thought.

"My cuffs will never wash white again, and all I have found is a mare's-nest.

However, I'll go to the bottom now.