s and a bold huntsman will
ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the mounds
and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who intermarried
with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the wealthiest of the
old county families until Curtis Fakenham entered upon his inheritance.
Money with him was like the farm-wife's dish of grain she tosses in
showers to her fowls. He was more than what you call a lady-killer, he
was a woman-eater. His pride was in it as well as his taste, and when
men are like that, indeed they are devourers!

Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose
offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain Kirby's
children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear. And these two brothers
were sons of Geoffrey Fakenham, celebrated for his devotion to
the French Countess Jules d'Andreuze, or some such name, a courtly
gentleman, who turned Papist on his death-bed in France, in Brittany
somewhere, not to be separated from her in the next world, as he
solemnly left word; wickedly, many think.

To show the oddness of things and how opposite to one another brothers
may be, his elder, the uncle of Curtis, and Baldwin, was the renowned
old Admiral Fakenham, better known along our sea-coasts and ports
among sailors as 'Old Showery,' because of a remark he once made to
his flag-captain, when cannon-balls were coming thick on them in a
hard-fought action. 'Hot work, sir,' his captain said. 'Showery,'
replied the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of
a cannon-ball. He lost both legs before the war was over, and said
merrily, 'Stumps for life'' while they were carrying him below to the
cockpit. In my girlhood the boys were always bringing home anecdotes of
old Admiral Showery: not all of them true ones, perhaps, but they fitted
him. He was a rough seaman, fond, as they say, of his glass and his
girl, and utterly despising his brother Geoffrey for the airs he gave
himself, and crawling on his knees to a female Parleyvoo; and when
Geoffrey died, the admiral drank to his rest in the grave: 'There's to
my brother Jeff,' he said, and flinging away the dregs of his glass:
'There 's to the Frog!' and flinging away the glass to shivers: 'There's
to the Turncoat!'

He salted his language in a manner I cannot repeat; no epithet ever
stood by itself. When I was young the boys relished these dreadful words
because they seemed to smell of tar