“Does your Honor desire that I leave all my papers?” queried the sepulchral-voiced Lester.
“All,” replied his Honor and he paused for a moment, and glanced at the ninety pages of manuscript lying in front of counsel learned in the law, “all except your brief, Mr. Lester.”
The proceedings of the day in the superior court were reported fully, and commented upon freely, by the newspapers throughout the country, and a fortnight afterwards the proposed executor of the rejected will received the following letter:—
Offices of David Morning, 39 Broadway, }
New York City, June 10, 1894. }
Mr. Louis Browning, San Francisco, Cal.—My Dear Sir: Such a wise and noble plan as that of the late Lorin French ought not to lack accomplishment for want of money to execute it. If you, and the gentlemen named by him as your associates in the trust which he vainly endeavored to create, will organize such a corporation as he proposed, I will devote to it a sum equal to the value of his estate, which I understand to be, in round numbers, twenty millions of dollars.
Very truly yours, David Morning.
CHAPTER XVI.
“The conscience of well doing is an ample reward.”
[From the New York World, July 15, 1895.]
Manhattan Island, west of Broadway and south of Trinity Church, was, during the last century, occupied by the substantial mansions of the ancient Knickerbockers, and as late as the first third of the present century was not relinquished as a place of residence by people of aristocratic pretensions. Before the civil war, the annual fairs of the American Institute were held in Castle Garden, within whose walls Grisi and Mario and Jenny Lind sang, and on summer afternoons children, accompanied by nursemaids, romped upon the grass under the grand old trees on the Battery. Then the Bowling Green Fountain, with its picturesque pile of rocks, was still an ancient landmark; and the goat pastures above Fifty-ninth Street were being cleared for the planting of Central Park.