Two only of his heirlooms had stood the crucial inspections of Lord Pit Town and his experts. These were the great Raphael, and the celebrated portrait of Barbara Chudleigh, the well-known beauty of Charles the Second's time, by Sir Peter Lely. Wicked Bab Chudleigh, as a wood nymph, simpered upon the walls of the new gallery in which the Chudleigh Raphael occupied the post of honour. We have seen what manner of man John, Earl of Pit Town, was. We have seen how his heirlooms troubled him not a little. We have seen how he passed his life with the faithful Wolff at Walls End Castle, patiently waiting to fill the numerous blanks on the walls of the new galleries, in fact to accomplish his destiny. For if ever there was a born collector, a real collector, to whom the actual intrinsic value of a painting was absolutely of no importance, it was John, Earl of Pit Town. And this indifference to the value at the hammer of their acquisitions, marks the distinction between the genuine collector or connoisseur and the ruck of the people who buy pictures; the bulk of whom are after all but amateur dealers. When the successful stock-jobber leaves off dealing in shares and takes to art, he merely deals in another more or less intangible security of very fluctuating value. With childlike confidence he follows the advice of some more or less honest dealer. He buys from the easel with a hope of a "rapid rise." Works are knocked down to him at Christie's simply because they are apparently cheap, and he is carrying out the old axiom of his trade, "always buy rubbish." In the same way he is perpetually buying and selling pictures upon the time honoured maxim of Capel Court, "nail your profit, and cut your loss." He will even go so far as to develop a taste for a particular master in the hope that he may succeed ultimately in making a "corner" in that special security. And the sole dream of such a man is the result in pounds, shillings and pence of the auction that will inevitably take place at his death. The possession of a certain number of valuable works of art confers an amount of distinction upon their proprietor, and Brown, who as Brown is a nobody, becomes a somebody as the owner of the Brown collection. Of this fact Manchester "men" and Liverpool "gentlemen" are well aware. But, as has been seen, a deep gulf divided these amateur dealers from John, Earl of Pit Town. The old earl's property, the source of his wealth, as from his title the reader will have shrewdly guessed, was in collieries. With the management of these, however, the Earl of Pit Town did not trouble himself. His various agents paid yearly increasing sums into that aristocratic bank in the Strand, which never allows interest on deposits, which never advises any investment except Consols, and whose clerks from time immemorial have worn white chokers.