Explore "The Great Skene Mystery" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and greet it for many a long day in their newspapers -- especially in the evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on that _cause célèbre_! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of '82. I am not going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation. Even the great Arthur -- great in bulk as in impudence -- has shrunk to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents.
What modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown on those doughty fields? -- lost, both, by their claimants, or pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few words as to which must now suffice.