vatory to view it more closely, the
parlour chimney engaged my attention. It was a pile of massive stone,
entirely out of proportion to the size of the apartment. On the front
had once been an armorial scutcheon; for the hammer, or chisel, which
had been employed to deface the shield or crest, had left uninjured
the scroll beneath, which bore the pious motto, 'TRUST IN GOD.'
Black-letter, you know, was my early passion, and the tombstones in the
Greyfriars' churchyard early yielded up to my knowledge as a decipherer
what little they could tell of the forgotten dead.

Joshua Geddes paused when he saw my eye fixed on this relic of
antiquity. 'Thou canst read it?' he said.

I repeated the motto, and added, there seemed vestiges of a date.

'It should be 1537,' said he; 'for so long ago, at the least
computation, did my ancestors, in the blinded times of Papistry, possess
these lands, and in that year did they build their house.'

'It is an ancient descent,' said I, looking with respect upon the
monument. 'I am sorry the arms have been defaced.'

It was perhaps impossible for my friend, Quaker as he was, to seem
altogether void of respect for the pedigree which he began to recount
to me, disclaiming all the while the vanity usually connected with
the subject; in short, with the air of mingled melancholy, regret, and
conscious dignity, with which Jack Fawkes used to tell us at college of
his ancestor's unfortunate connexion with the Gunpowder Plot.

'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,' thus harangued Joshua Gleddes
of Mount Sharon; 'if we ourselves are nothing in the sight of Heaven,
how much less than nothing must be our derivation from rotten bones and
mouldering dust, whose immortal spirits have long since gone to their
private account? Yes, friend Latimer, my ancestors were renowned among
the ravenous and bloodthirsty men who then dwelt in this vexed country;
and so much were they famed for successful freebooting, robbery, and
bloodshed, that they are said to have been called Geddes, as likening
them to the fish called a Jack, Pike, or Luce, and in our country
tongue, a GED--a goodly distinction truly for Christian men! Yet did
they paint this shark of the fresh waters upon their shields, and these
profane priests of a wicked idolatry, the empty boasters called heralds,
who make engraven images of fishes, fowls, and four-footed beasts, that
men may fall down and worship them, assigned the ged for the device and