Band is a truly magnificent thing. But to be an Heir has also
about it something extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost
heir--an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto
unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the
consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long
feloniously withheld--but even to be a common humdrum domestic
heir is a profession to which few would refuse to be apprenticed.

To step from leading-strings and restrictions and one glass of
port after dinner, into property and liberty and due
appreciation, saved up, polished and varnished, dusted and
laid in lavender, all expressly for you--why, even the Princedom
and the Robber Captaincy, when their anxieties and
responsibilities are considered, have hardly more to offer. And
so it will continue to be a problem, to the youth in whom
ambition struggles with a certain sensuous appreciation of life's
side-dishes, whether the career he is called upon to select out
of the glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better
be that of an heir or an engine-driver.

In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving
itself. In childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to
work on the principle of the "Borough-English" of our happier
ancestors, and in most cases of inheritance it is the youngest
that succeeds. Where the "res" is "angusta," and the weekly
books are simply a series of stiff hurdles at each of which in
succession the paternal legs falter with growing suspicion
of their powers to clear the flight, it is in the affair of
CLOTHES that the right of succession tells, and "the hard heir
strides about the land" in trousers long ago framed for fraternal