and porters, and fraplers, and bullies."

Yes; the Unknown Lady was my Grandmother. I purpose now to relate to you
her History, revealed to me many years after her death, in a manner to
be mentioned at the proper time.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

THE HISTORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER, WHO WAS A LADY OF CONSEQUENCE IN THE WEST
COUNTRY.

MY Grandmother was born at Bristol, about the year 1630, and in the
reign of King Charles the First. She came of a family noted for their
long lives, and of whom there was, in good sooth, a proverb in the West
setting forth that "Bar Gallows, Glaive, and the Gout, every Greenville
would live to a hundred." Her maiden name was Greenville: she was
baptised Arabella; and she was the only daughter of Richard Greenville,
an Esquire of a fair estate between Bath and Bristol, where his
ancestors had held their land for three hundred years, on a Jocular
Tenure of presenting the king, whenever he came that way, with a
goose-pie, the legs sticking through the crust. It was Esquire
Greenville's misfortune to come to his patrimony just as those unhappy
troubles were fomenting which a few years after embroiled these kingdoms
in one great and dismal Quarrel. It was hard for a gentleman of
consequence in his own county, and one whose forefathers had served the
most considerable offices therein,--having been of the Quorum ever since
the reign of King Edward the Third,--to avoid mingling in some kind or
another in the dissensions with which our beloved country was then torn.
Mr. Greenville was indeed a person of a tranquil and placable humour, to
whom party janglings were thoroughly detestable; and although he leant
naturally, as beseemed his degree, towards the upholding of his
Majesty's Crown and Dignity, and the maintenance in proper Honour and
Splendour of the Church, he was too good a Christian and citizen not to
shrink from seeing his native land laid waste by the blind savageness
of a Civil War. And although, he paid Cess and Ship-money without
murmuring, and, on being chosen a Knight of the Shire, did zealously
speak up in the Commons House of Parliament on the King's side (refusing
nevertheless to make one of the lip-serving crowd of courtiers of
Whitehall), and although, when churchwarden in his parish, he ever
preserved the laudable custom of Whitsun and Martinmas ales for the good
of the poor, and persisted in having the Book of Sports read from the
pulpit,--he was averse from all high-handed m