Equity Pleading and Practice, Master: exceptions to report; Appeal. Adverse Possession.
Exceptions in a suit in equity to findings of fact by a master in a report which does not report the evidence must be overruled if the findings are not inconsistent with each other. Exceptions in a suit in equity to rulings by a master excluding evidence offered before him must be overruled where it appears that the evidence, even if admitted, was immaterial and could not have affected the result. Upon an appeal, by the plaintiff in a suit in equity seeking to establish title by adverse possession to a strip of land of which the defendant, an adjoining owner, owned the record title, from a final decree establishing the plaintiff's right to a portion only of the strip claimed, the decree must be affirmed where it appears that as to the remaining portion of the strip the adverse possession of the plaintiff, while continuing for nineteen years, eleven months and five days, had not continued for twenty years.
WAIT, J.
This cause is before us upon the plaintiff's appeals from an interlocutory decree which overruled her thirty-two exceptions to a master's report and confirmed the report, and from a final decree which does not grant her all that she wants.
The exceptions were dealt with properly. There was no report of the evidence before the master. It is elementary that in such a case no exception will be sustained to the master's findings of fact. Henderson v. Foster, 182 Mass. 447. Nearly all the exceptions relate to such findings, and present no question, either of law or fact, with which this court will deal. The remaining exceptions relate to the exclusion of evidence offered by the plaintiff. They, too, were properly overruled; for had all the evidence been admitted it was immaterial and could not have affected the result.
The plaintiff's real trouble is that to acquire title to another's land by adverse possession, one must have held it full twenty years, and not nineteen years and some months.
We see no reason to disturb the master's findings that the boundary line between lots 10 and 11 on the plan by which they were conveyed in 1902 and 1903, ran in the place he determined; and that the plaintiff has occupied adversely, continuously, openly, and under claim of right for full twenty years that portion only of lot 11 to which the final decree establishes that she now has title.
The interlocutory decree is affirmed. The final decree is affirmed, with costs.
So ordered.