mournful stories about "the late Mr. William Lord," or "James Perkins," or whatever the names might have been, and declared that their late partners had always told them there was an immense estate in England for them, and so on. The pious and the less pious each wrote his peculiar letter. But what was most noticeable was, that almost all of them assumed the airs of "nabobs." And why shouldn't they? Were they not on the eve of becoming immensely rich? And what is there in this world, with its grievous labors and trials, comparable to riches? I presume this same sort of trick could be successfully played with almost any family in the land which has an American line extending back of the Revolution, say, for a hundred years, and with many of less age, so great is the desire to get riches. Indeed, there is a lawyer in Vermont who has made the matter of searching out estates in England a study. He spent ten years in England in hunting up genealogies and titles; has a regular partner in London to whom he transmits business from this country, and publishes a good-sized pamphlet filled with the names of families residing in America, and entitled to property in England. This lawyer now and then gets an important case, in which his fees amount to something handsome,--sometimes to twenty thousand dollars. But this is wandering from the direct line of my story, though, perchance, it is far more interesting than the simple detecting part of the tale. My old friend King left the city, and went home a few days after I accepted the work; but his interest did not flag because he had handed over the matter to another, but rather increased. His letters were very frequent, sometimes three a week, none of which, except the first, did I take the trouble to reply to for a long while. I soon found that I needed more facts than I had in my possession to enable me to reach any practical result. It was impossible to find any job printer in the city who had ever done a job for "Lord, King, and Graham." Nobody had ever seen the letter-head before, and no one could suggest where the work was probably done. It was not recognized as like the style of anybody. Possibly it was done out of the city; but the fact was, as I afterwards learned, that it had been done privately by a firm which had meanwhile failed in business, and I was baffled on that point. I expected to fail, and so gave but little heed to the matter; but it finally occurred to me that if I could find some King, or somebody else who had received a letter and not replied to it, that he might at that late day make reply in such way as to get into a correspondence with the parties, and I could then have them followed from the post office, or in some other way trap them. About this time I went on to Louisville, Ky., and there encountered a gentleman, one of the King family,--we will call him Lemuel, for a name,--whom I had not met in some fifteen years before. He was a New Yorker by birth, and I