"
All things had gone well for M. Lenoble. His direct descent from Matthew
Haygarth, the father of the intestate, had been proved to the
satisfaction of Crown lawyers and High Court of Chancery, and he had been
in due course placed in possession of the reverend intestate's estate, to
the profit and pleasure of his solicitors and M. Fleurus, and to the
unspeakable aggravation of George Sheldon, who washed his hands at once
and for ever of all genealogical research, and fell back in an embittered
and angry spirit upon the smaller profits to be derived from petty
transactions in the bill-discounting line, and a championship of
penniless sufferers of all classes, from a damsel who considered herself
jilted by a fickle swain, in proof of whose inconstancy she could produce
documentary evidence of the "pork-chop and tomato sauce" order, to a
pedestrian who knocked his head against a projecting shutter in the
Strand, and straightway walked home to Holloway to lay himself up for a
twelvemonth in a state of mental and bodily incapacity requiring large
pecuniary redress from the owner of the fatal shutter. To this noble
protection of the rights of the weak did George Sheldon devote his
intellect; and when malicious enemies stigmatized these Quixotic
endeavours as "speculative actions," or when, in the breaking-down of
some oppressed damsel's cause by reason of the slender evidence afforded
by some reticent lover's epistolary effusions, unjust judges told him
that he "ought to be ashamed of himself" for bringing such an action, the
generous attorney no doubt took consolation from an approving conscience,
and went forth from that court, to look for other oppressed damsels or
injured wayfarers, erect and unshaken.
Pages:
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556