WRECKED IN PORT.

A SERIAL STORY BY THE AUTHOR OF "BLACK SHEEP."

CHAPTER IX. THE TENTH EARL.

HETHERINGTON HOUSE stands in Beaufort-
square, forming one side of that confessedly
aristocratic quarter. The house
stands back in melancholy "grounds" of
dirty gravel, brown turf, and smutted
trees, while the dwarf wall which forms
the side of the square, and is indeed a
sufficiently huge brick screen, fences off the
commonalty, and prevents them from ever
catching so much as a glimpse of the Paradise
within, save when the great gates are
flung open for the entrance or exit of
vehicles, or when the porter, so gorgeous
and yet so simple, is sunning himself in the
calm evening air at the small postern door.
The Countess of Hetherington likes this
brick screen, and looks upon it as a necessary
appanage of her rank. When visitors,
having exhausted every topic of conversation
possible to their great minds, a feat
which is easily performed in the space of
five minutes, and beginning to fear the
immediate advent of brain softening if not of
idiocy, suddenly become possessed with a
fresh idea after a lengthened contemplation
of the wall in front of them, and with an
air of desperation ask whether it does not
make the house dull, Lady Hetherington
says that, on the contrary, it is the only
thing that renders the house habitable.
She confesses that, during the time she is
compelled to be in London, the sight of
hack cabs, and policemen on their beat,
and those kind of things, are not absolutely
necessary to her existence, and as Sir
Charles Dumfunk insists on her rooms
facing the west, she is glad that the wall
is there to act as a screen. Oh yes, she is
perfectly aware that Lord Letterkenney
had the screen of Purcell House pulled
down and an open Italian façade erected
in its place, the picture of which was in
the illustrated papers, but as Lady
Letterkenney until her marriage had lived in
Ireland, and had probably never seen
anything human except priests and pigs, the
sight of civilised beings was doubtless an
agreeable novelty to her. The same
circumstances did not exist in her, Lady
Hetherington's, case, and she decidedly
liked the screen.

The Earl likes the screen also, but he
never says anything about it, chiefly
because no one ever asks his opinion on any
subject. He likes it because it is his, the
Earl of Hetherington's, and he likes looking
at it as he likes looking at the coronet
on his plate, on his carriage panels, and his
horses' harness; at his family history as set
forth by Burke and Debrett, and at the
marginal illustrations of his coat of arms as
given in those charming volumes; at his
genealogical tree, a mysterious work of art
which hangs in the library looking
something like an enlarged "sampler" worked
by a school-girl, and from the contemplation
of which he derives intense delight.
It does not take a great deal to fill Lord
Hetherington's soul with rapture. Down
in Norfolk villages, in the neighbourhood
of his ancestral home, and far away in
scattered cottages on the side of green Welsh
mountains, where the cross-tree rears its
inopportune head in the midst of the lovely
landscape, and where smoke and coal-dust
permeate the soft delicious air, his lordship,
as landlord and mine-holder, is spoken of
with bated breath by tenants and workmen,
and regarded as one of the hardest-headed,
tightest-fisted men of business by stewards