[Footnote N: This singular compliment (a universal one among the Cossacks) is probably a relic of the old custom of raising their "Kosbevoi," or head chief, on a shield when elected.]
This closes the entertainment, for it is now nearly midnight, and we are to start again at sunrise. We take a cordial leave of our new friends, and depart, laden with bunches of grapes which are somewhat difficult to carry conveniently.
"I wonder why they tossed me up like that?" muses Allfact, as we grope our way down to the shore.
"Why!" answers Smoothbore. "Why, to take a _rise_ out of you, to be sure."
"Nothing so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind," says Sir William Blackstone, "as the right of property." Sure it is, that society palpitates whenever a great estate passes to a new owner, disclosing its vastness in the act of transit. Perhaps for this fact we may find another reason in Blackstone, where he says: "There is no foundation in nature why the son should have the right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground because his father had done so before him, or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his death-bed, and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him." But since the law, to reward thrift and avoid strife, has established this artificial right of disposal, the disparities of fortune, on these signal occasions of transfer, always set us to pondering.
Vanderbilt, last of the three monstrously rich men of New York who have died within three years, furnishes in his will the now tripled evidence of a new ambition in American Croesuses--an aim to keep their fortunes rolling and greatening for several generations in the exact paths where they were started. Supposing that Mr. Stewart's bequest to Judge Hilton was designed to purchase his entrance into the dry goods firm, we should have a common aim of the triumvirate, since each has put a chosen man into his shoes, as if with the hope to live on in this successor, like Mordecai in "Deronda." The master passion of acquisition is thus striving to outwit death. Astor and Vanderbilt found their second selves in favorite sons; childless Stewart could only take his confidential agent. Each conceivably died in the hope that a successor so carefully selected and endowed would in turn hand over the bulk of his gigantic wealth, in its original channel, to some steward chosen with equal care; so that ages hence the Astor fortune still in houses, the Stewart fortune still in trade, the Vanderbilt fortune still in railways, might flourish under successive guardians, faithful to their tradition and training. The John Jacob, the Cornelius, the Alexander of the past has been blessed with the vision of his millions multiplying as he would have them multiply, and haply has dreamed of accomplishing by his own foresight an entail which he could not create under the laws.