The Forlorn Hope A Novel Volume II Author:Edmund Hodgson Yates 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: CHAPTER III. FAMILY RELATIONS. When the Kilsyths were in London, which, according to their general practice, was only from February until June, they lived ... more »in a big square house in Brook-street,—an old-fashioned house, with a multiplicity of rooms, necessary for their establishment, which demanded besides the ordinary number of what were known in the house- agent's catalogue as " reception rooms," a sitting-room for Kilsyth, where he could be quiet and uninterrupted by visitors, and read the Times, and Scrope's Salmon Fishing, and Colonel Hawker on Shooting, and Cyril Thornton, and Gleig's Subaltern, and Napier's History of the Peninsular War, and one or two other books which formed his library; where he could smoke his cigar, and pass in review his guns and his gaiters and his VOL. II. K waterproofs, and hold colloquy with his man, Sandy MacCollop, as to what sport they had had the past year, and what they expected to have the next—without fear of interruption. This sanctuary of Kilsyth's lay far at the back of the house, at the end of a passage never penetrated by ordinary visitors, who indeed never inquired for the master of the house. Special guests were admitted there occasionally; and perhaps two or three times in the season there was a council-fire, to which some of the keenest sportsmen, who knew Kilsyth, and were about to visit it in the autumn, were admitted,—round which the smoke hung thick, and the conversation generally ran in monosyllables. Lady Muriel's boudoir—another of the extraneous rooms which the house-agent's catalogue wotteth not of—led off the principal staircase through a narrow passage; and, so far as extravagance and good taste could combine in luxury, was the room of the house. When you are not an appraiser's apprentice, it is difficult to...« less