Book Description:
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: THE STOLEN BLENKINSOP IF it had been necessary for Mr. Hector Bushell to make a fortune for himself there can be little doubt that he would have done it. Fortunately or unfortunately just as you please the necessity did not exist, for his father had done it for him before he was born. Consequently, Hector, who was a genial if somewhat boisterous young man, devoted his talents to the service of his friends, whose happiness he insisted on promoting, with their concurrence or without it, by the exercise of his knowledge of the world and whatever was in it, his businesslike acumen, his exuberant animal spirits, and his overflowing, almost pestilential, energy. Quiet mannered acquaintances who spied him afar dodged round corners and ran, rather than have their fortunes made by his vigorously expressed advice, enforced by heavy slaps on the shoulder and sudden digs in the ribs, and sometimes punctuated with a hearty punch in the chest. For he was a large and strong, as well as a noisy, young man, accurately, if vulgarly, described by his acquaintance as perpetually 'full of beans.' He had given himself a reputation as an art critic, on the strength of a year or two's attendance at an art school in Paris; and, indeed, he maintained a studio of his own, expensively furnished, where he received his friends and had more than once begun a picture. But his energies in this matter were mainly directed to the good of painters among his acquaintances, who were under the necessity of living by their work. He told them how their pictures should be painted, and how they could certainly be sold. Indeed, in this latter respect he did better than advise the painter he advised the buyer, when he could seize one, and trundled him captive in the studio of his nearest friend with great fidelity and...
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