&c.

Now, this is the strange fact which has always puzzled me as well as others.
The old De Beauvoir was a very thrifty miser, and died two hundred years ago possessed of great wealth, which has increased enormously up to our day, seeing he had landed property in the north of London, now including De Beauvoir Town.
In the second generation, his grand-daughters Rachel Martin of the elder branch and Marie Priaulx of the younger, contended at law for the inheritance after some intestacy: and a terrible lawsuit raged in Chancery for 150 years, between the Tuppers and the Benyons,--and was carried even to the House of Lords, being finally decided in my memory for the Benyons.

I remember my uncle saying he would not take thirty thousand pounds for his individual chance,--but my less sanguine father cared not to join in the lawsuit,--saying he would not "throw good money after bad." For my own judgment, and I can speak as an old conveyancing barrister (though without business or experience) of nearly fifty years' standing, our side as the elder had the best right, though the two sisters might well and wisely have shared in a compromise.

But somehow it came to be decided that the younger claimant of that vast property must have _all_,--and the elder be strangely left out in the cold.

After the conclusion of the Lords, further litigation was hopeless: so those whom I now represent (as almost the "last of the Abruzzi") must acquiesce in getting nothing, while the opponent side has the good luck to possess, as Dr.Johnson has it, "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." Such is life,--and law: the most obstinate and the richest win: the less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail: it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest.