“Will you be so good as to state the name and position of your father, his place of birth, the school or college where he was educated, and the place of residence at his decease.”

“Arthur Howard Carlton, Colonel of Cavalry in the service of Her Majesty, born at Montazuena, in Mexico, educated at Rugby, and died at Exeter, Devonshire, England, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, leaving but one son, your obedient servant,” here Arthur bowed in a somewhat stately manner to his, interrogater.

“Exactly so,” said the lawyer, glancing at a paper he held in his hand, which he then placed on the table, and taking up another, said: 

“Will you now tell me all that you know concerning, your grandfather?”

“He was called Eustace Vere Carleton, I believe, from the fact of his signing himself so in his letters to my father, wherein he desired that he should enter the British service, and said that he should provide his commission and make him a small yearly allowance as long as he remained in the service,—­these two letters are now in my possession and at your service, should you require them,” so saying, Carlton took from his desk the papers in question, which he handed to the Lawyer.  “But, pray, sir, in what way and to what extent am I to be benefitted by the early proceedings of my paternal relatives?” enquired the Dragoon, darting at the same time a knowing wink at the surgeon, who at that moment happened to look up, for until then he had appeared to be deeply absorbed with a late number of Punch, though in truth he was very much interested in, and had not lost a word of the conversation that had been going on between the lawyer and his friend Carlton, but he only shook his head in acknowledgment of the friendly wink, and continued to turn over the pages of that comical but highly interesting periodical which he had taken up at the commencement of the interview.

“Every lost link in the chain of evidence is, I believe, now complete,” replied Mr. Capias, “and I am at liberty to communicate to you the following circumstance which, doubtless, up to the present time you have been a stranger to.”  He hereupon cleared his throat, and in a well modulated voice said: 

“Maud Chumly, your great grandmother, the daughter of a Church of England Clergyman, at the age of eighteen married Arthur Eustace Carlton, ninth Earl of Castlemere.  The result of their union was a son, a wild, harum scarum sort of a youth who, at the age of nineteen, was provided with an appointment and sent out to the British Embassy at the Court of Spain.  While here he managed to get entangled and elope with the wife of a Castillian Hidalgo; they were pursued and overtaken by the enraged Grandee and his followers; the lady was recovered, but the husband lost his life in a duel with the gay Lothario who, subsequently, to avoid the vengeance of the family and the strong arm of the law, fled to Mexico, where, a few years