Page:Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891 Volume 1).pdf/85

 our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old D’Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-D’Urbervilles were no more D’Urbervilles of the true tree than he was himself. Yet it must be admitted that this family formed a very good stack whereon to regraft a name which sadly wanted such renovation.

When old Mr. Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his fortune as an honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North, he decided to settle as a county man in the South of England, out of hail of his business district; and in doing this he felt the necessity of recommencing with a name not quite so well remembered there, and less commonplace than the two original bald stark words. Conning for an hour in the British Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct, half-extinct, obscured, and ruined families appertaining to the quarter of England in which he proposed to settle, he considered that D’Urberville looked and sounded as well as any of them: and D'Urberville accordingly was annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally. Yet