Unprecedented success had waited upon every enterprise undertaken by the old-established and respected firm of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd. The Scottish banking-house had thriven wonderfully in the hospitable English capital. “We've nae need to tell these Southeran bodies that we're Scotche,” Alick remarked to his brother as he wrote his name for the first time A. The young gentlemen signed their names M`Floyd when they first entered their uncle's counting-house but they very soon followed that wise relative's example, and dropped the formidable prefix. The Kentish rustics knew very little of this city banking-house, for Archibald Martin, the senior partner, has long retired from any active share in the business, which is carried on entirely by his nephews, Andrew and Alexander Floyd, both steady, middle-aged men, with families and country-houses both owing their fortune to the rich uncle, who had found places in his counting-house for them some thirty years before, when they were tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, red-complexioned Scottish youths, fresh from some unpronounceable village north of Aberdeen. The stately red-built mansion belongs to Maister Floyd, as he is called in the honest patois of the Kentish rustics to Archibald Martin Floyd, of the great banking-house of Floyd, Floyd, and Floyd, Lombard street, City. The long rows of narrow windows are all aflame with the red light, and an honest homeward-tramping villager pauses once or twice in the roadway to glance across the smooth width of dewy lawn and tranquil lake, half fearful that there must be something more than natural in the glitter of those windows, and that may be Maister Floyd's house is afire. Upon the broad façade of a mighty redbrick mansion, built in the favorite style of the early Georgian era, the sinking sun lingers long, making gorgeous illumination. The encircling woods and wide lawn-like meadows, the still ponds of limpid water, the trim hedges, and the smooth winding roads undulating hill-tops, melting into the purple distance laboring-men's cottages, gleaming white from the surrounding foliage solitary roadside inns with brown thatched roofs and moss-grown stacks of lop-sided chimneys noble mansions hiding behind ancestral oaks tiny Gothic edifices Swiss and rustic lodges pillared gates surmounted by escutcheons hewn in stone, and festooned with green wreaths of clustering ivy village churches and prim school-houses-every object in the fair English prospect is steeped in a luminous haze, as the twilight shadows steal slowly upward from the dim recesses of shady woodland and winding lane, and every outline of the landscape darkens against the deepening crimson of the sky. Autumn's red finger has been lightly laid upon the foliage-sparingly, as the artist puts the brighter tints into his picture but the grandeur of an August sunset blazes upon the peaceful landscape, and lights all into glory. HOW A RICH BANKER MARRIED AN ACTRESS.įaint streaks of crimson glimmer here and there amid the rich darkness of the Kentish woods.
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