Their mouths watered for the great city, yet it seemed no nearer to them than when three thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. They talked loudly of their rights, but there was the little difficulty of possession, which is sometimes a trifle more than nine points of the law. I have conversed with unreasonable members of a certain Church, which claims to be universal, who considered that half England—half the vast domains owned by lords and ladies, by the two hundred and fifty proprietors of Great Britain—was really the property of the Church, if she had her rights. There are those who consider that Algeria ought to belong to the Arabs, that Africa belongs to the blacks, and India to the Hindoos. Sat there comes this awkward item of possession. You have to buy the man in possession out, or else pitch him out; and the difficulty in this case was that there were so many in possession. Eight companies and a Corporation are not easily ejected. The fact was, the grand family council was a farce, and fell through. Even as a demonstration it completely failed. The members of it might just as well have stayed at home, and sent a monster petition to the House of Lords, several hundred yards long (as per the usual custom now-a-days), and their progress would have been about as great. The _Stirmingham Daily News_, which had published the life of Sternhold Baskette, and defended his legitimate line, poured bitter satire upon it, and held the whole business up to ridicule—as well it might. The _News_ was now Conservative. The intense self-conceit of the Yankees—to imagine that they were going to quietly take possession of a great English city, and hoist the Stars and Stripes on Saint George’s Cathedral at Stirmingham! The American gentlemen fumed and fussed, and uttered threats of making the Stirmingham claim a feature in the next Presidential election—it should “leave the low sphere of personal contention, and enter the arena of political discussion;” so they said. It should be a new _Alabama_ case; and if they could not have Stirmingham, they would have—the Dollars! Meantime the dollars disappeared rather rapidly, and, after a month or six weeks of these endless wranglings in the Sternhold Hall, there began to be symptoms of an early break-up. First, three or four, then ten, then a dozen, crept off, and quietly sailed for New York, lighter in pocket, and looking rather foolish. The body, however, of the claimants could not break up in that ignominious manner. It was necessary for them to do something to mark the fact that they had been there, at all events.