His Grace — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HIS GRACE. 9 for the moment from personal perplexities; because, although I had never seen the deceased nobleman, and although, as the newspaper obligingly informed its readers, he had not been in any sense a prominent personage, I remembered that my old schoolfellow Arthur Gascoigne had been his nephew and his heir- presumptive. The presumption had now been con- verted into a reality; the small boy who had been my fag not so very long before, who had basked in my smiles and trembled at my frown, was a full-blown duke, while I was but a budding solicitor, not to say a solicitor who had been frostily nipped in the bud. Such are the revenges of time, and such the inequali- ties of human existence! However, I was not so shabby as to grudge Gascoigne his promotion. We can’t all of us be dukes, and he had always been such a good little fellow that I had no doubt as to his event- ually proving quite as presentable a duke as the rest of his compeers. I had not seen much of him since old Eton days, our paths in life having naturally been so divergent; still, we had come across one another every now and again, and he had always seemed glad to see me and chat over bygone times. I was glad to think that all this honor and wealth had come to him, because I suspected from what I had heard that he had become a somewhat extravagant young gentleman, and I knew that he was not rich. While I was holding the unread newspaper in my hand and meditating philosophically over the tremen- dous issues involved in a system of hereditary succes- sion, I was accosted by another member of the club who was alsoa former schoolfellow of mine, and who said— “So old Hurstbourne has been gathered to his fathers Eomichoo cS: G