You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and greet it for many a long day in their newspapers--especially in the evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on that _cause célèbre_! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation. Even the great Arthur--great in bulk as in impudence--has shrunk to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown on those doughty fields?--lost, both, by their claimants, or pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few words as to which must now suffice. Lord Skene persisting obstinately in disputing my claim, and my cause being warmly espoused by my friends, led to the institution of those legal proceedings which were to result in that action at law before the Lords of the Court of Common Pleas, which came to be known as the Great Skene Mystery, and which in the end found me non-suited and disinherited. The case lasted many weeks, and entailed the production of a little army of witnesses. Its expenses shake my memory to this day; though, thank Heaven, some subsequent successes were to enable me to come to some sort of a compromise for them with their guarantor--my blessed and admirable Johnny. Its chief weakness consisted in its failure to procure any reliable depositions from the witness who should have been its first--my poor stricken mother. A disastrous blow to it was the death of Mother Carey on the very evening following her receipt of an official citation to the Court to give her evidence. That, resolving itself into a matter of second-hand, brought about my discomfiture. Whatever was the moral of the case--and their appreciation of its true bent was conveyed to me spontaneously by a large number of independent persons, legal and otherwise--so reckless a dealing with our institutions as would be entailed in the upsetting of an hereditary title on circumstantial evidence was hardly to be thought of. My claim was dismissed as, in Scottish parlance, not proven, and Master Baby was confirmed in his succession to the lordship of Evercreech.