The Argosy — page 96: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

TB BAR GoQ cee | FEBRUARY, 188r. eee —— eer nh ben ETRE Kk EE TGH BY MRS. HENRY WOOD, AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE.” CHAPTER IV. AT CHENEVIX HOUSE. [7 was a magnificent room, everything magnificent about it, as it was fitting the library of Chenevix House should be: a fine mansion overlooking Hyde Park. What good is there to be imagined —worldly good—that fortune, so capricious in her favours, had not showered down upon the owner of this house, the Earl of Acorn? None. With his majority he had come into a princely income, for his father, the late earl, died years before, and the estates had been well nursed. Better had it been, though, for the young Earl of Acorn that he had been born a younger son, or in an inferior rank of life. With that spur to exertion, necessity, he would have pushed on and exercised the talents which had been liberally bestowed on him; but gliding as he did into a fortune that seemed unlimited, he plunged into every extravagant folly of the day, and did his best to dissipate it. He was twenty-one then; he is walking about his library now—you may see him if you choose to enter it—with four or five and thirty years added to his life : pacing up and down in perplexity, and possess- ing scarcely a shilling that he can call his own. Huis six-and-fifty years have rendered his figure somewhat portly, and an expression of annoyance is casting its shade on his clear brow and handsome features ; but no deeper lines of sorrow are marked there. Not upon these careless natures does the hand of care leave its sign. But the Earl is—to make the best of it—1n a brown study, and he scowls his eyebrows, and purses his lips, and motions with his hands as he paces there, communing with himself. Not that he is so much perplexed as to how he shall escape his already great em- barrassments, as he is to contrive the means to raise more money, and so rush into greater. The gratification of the present moment ~—little else ever troubled Lord Acorn, 3 VOL. &XxXI. G COMIC OOO SS (C(O)