Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 62 CHAPTER XV. LORD KESWICK. A Young man whose friends have accustomed him, from his youth up, to regard sovereigns merely as a convenient species of counter, obtainable whenever and in whatsoever quantity desired, cannot reasonably be expected to have any definite ideas as to the means of confining his expenditure within the limits of his income ; and should the father of such a young man find long bills coming in to him for articles supplied to his son, he ought to pay them without a murmur, remembering that he has only himself to thank for this annoyance. Parents, however, are not, as a rule, disposed to impute blame to themselves any more than the rest of humanity, and Lord Grassmere, when he had paid away nearly twenty-thousand pounds on his son'sbehalf, was sufficiently illogical to consider himself a hardly-used man. As an Eton boy, Lord Keswick, when he happened to take a fancy to anything, immediately ordered it to be sent to him at his tutor's, and put his hand into his pocket to pay for it. If, by any chance, he found nothing there, he wrote to his father mentioning the fact, and the deficiency was supplied. Later in life, when he was serving her Majesty as a cornet in the Blues, and had a banker's account of his own, he simply wrote a cheque for any sum that might be required of him, and thought no more about it. He was a handsome, merry little fellow, with a round boyish face, whom everybody knew, everybody liked, and whom, it is to be feared, not a few people swindled. Being of a free and generous nature and of extremely expensive tastes, it is probable that he might have found himself in difficulties very early in life, if it had not been for the accident of a rich relation dying suddenly, and leaving him the undisputed control of a very comfortable fort...