Lady Baltimore

nlike as most of his sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she it was who put it into my

erefore I were lacking in deference did I pass her and her Scions by without due mention,--employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately. Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me, nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew quite well who the boy was. When I wr

t very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have descended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, adding that she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach de Gotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publication to me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or upwards, and for this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightful coat-of-arms and with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids, the Vestal Virgins, and all the best people in the world. Therefore I felicitated the Boadicean lady upon the illustrious progenitrix with whom th

ost nobody else is qualified to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds and thousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body? You may try this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society, farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire in doctors, academicians,

city and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her husband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneath her; and she seemed unprepared for his rece

"I don't know them." She can make her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "take umbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to take outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had--"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give you her own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and

ide of the family," s

ot have to fe

ent. "Me descen

ent stateliness. "There seems

od in my v

Augustus. Why m

unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I

sovereign may I

ilation, entitled The American Almanach de G

ght have hesitated to trace it back had you said--w

e to notice my Aunt's eye; but I did

ere was anybody present to marry Adam and Eve, a

gus

quiet but prodigious tone to

who was n

rpose trifling, you

g your pardon.

to adopt such a manner to me, when

rd a lady of distinction, and my Aunt was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She no

as plain as mine (through Admiral Bombo, you k

of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and there were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for me was, what kind had m

pecies, "but of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was a mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning

wpens. In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men, these were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If I returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Select

is, of which I had rather not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you will have so much resear

betray my ignorance of these Bombos; I worked my e

ny rate. And I," my Aunt handsomely finishe

partly from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and

us," was her par