Mr. George de Bohun had acquired--perhaps from his father--an unusual reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of "The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de Bohuns--pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family, certainly never sold and--please God!--never lost, was a religion with George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came, perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid. This second in the great line, George de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--the son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and, having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house known as Paulings. This mansion was--and is--situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne. Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no longer connected with trade. He died--as he had been born--at Paulings, a country house of such absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in accurate if tedious terms.