and the error of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. Mr. Fyshe was thinking
that the Duke had come to _lend_ money. In reality he had
come to _borrow_ it. In fact, the Duke was reckoning that
by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers for twenty
thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting
and leasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh
coal rent he could raise altogether a hundred thousand
pounds. This for a duke, is an enormous sum. If he once
had it he would be able to pay off the first mortgage on
Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant
of the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present
mortgagee of the Irish grazing, and in fact be just where
he started. This is ducal finance, which moves always in
a circle.

In other words the Duke was really a poor man--not poor
in the American sense, where poverty comes as a sudden
blighting stringency, taking the form of an inability to
get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no matter
how badly one needs it, and where it passes like a
storm-cloud and is gone, but poor in that permanent and
distressing sense known only to the British aristocracy.
The Duke's case, of course, was notorious, and Mr. Fyshe
ought to have known of it. The Duke was so poor that the
Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months every
year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save
money, and his eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle,
had to put in most of his time shooting big game in
Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five beaters, and with
so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of elephant