Vittore Carpaccio paintings

Vittore Carpaccio paintings
Warren Kimble paintings
fortunate enough to be useful to Mr. Franklin Blake.
I have been cut off from all news of my relatives by marriage for some time past. When we are isolated and poor, we are not infrequently forgotten. I am now living, for economy's sake, in a little town in Brittany, inhabited by a select circle of serious English friends, and possessed of the inestimable advantages of a Protestant clergyman and a cheap market.
In this retirement--a Patmos amid the howling ocean of popery that surrounds us--a letter from England has reached me at last. I find my insignificant existence suddenly remembered by Mr. Franklin Blake. My wealthy relative--would that I could add my spiritually wealthy relative!--writes, without even an attempt at disguising that he wants something of me. The whim has seized him to stir up the deplorable scandal of the Moonstone: and I am to help him by writing the account of what I myself witnessed while visiting at Aunt Verinder's house in London. Pecuniary remuneration is offered me--with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances--and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr. Blake's