Meantime, the parties to the _Petition_ are dead, or absconded, or beggared. Years have elapsed; all parties are worn out or impoverished by the enormous expenses--at length, there is no one to pay Lawyers and the Court Officers--the thing _lapses_--dies. Term after Term (as Sessions of the Court are called), the Case is called. Some poor wretch struggles still to save something of the property _tied up_ in the Court by the Case--he tries to call up from the mass of dusty and forgotten Records, a reminiscence of the lost Petition. In vain--the thing is a wreck, and has wrecked its builders! The Case lies forgotten amid the interminable processes, affidavits, answers, pleas, replications, rejoinders, motions, applications, notices, subpoenas, summonses, commissions, bills of amendments, and of supplement; documents of all sorts, making up the _Case_, mouldering away in the stone alcoves of the huge Records; as the poor victims of it lie mouldering in similar forgetfulness! Not, however, without profit to the Lawyer-Caste; for some miscreant of this profession, perchance, discovering the Case, in his searches after means of spoil, sees how _he_ may gain by it. He knows of an estate remotely touched by the matter of the old and forgotten Petition, and he knows quite well that there is really nothing affecting the property; yet, he sees fees and spoil. It is merely to frighten the possessor of the estate by an intimation of a _defect of title_, and refer to this old Case, never decided. The _bandit_ [khe-te] sets in motion the machinery of the High Court of Chancery. One of its officers summonses the poor man to come into that Court, and answer to the allegations touching his right to possess the house in which, perhaps, he has lived for twenty years! and lived without objection from any source!