mind, let me record
for others the years that I spent with my young Alcides as he now
stands before me in memory.

Our family history is a strange one. I, Lucy Alison, never even saw my
twin brothers--nor, indeed, knew of their existence--during my
childhood. I had one brother a year younger than myself, and as long
as he lived he was treated as the eldest son, and neither he nor I ever
dreamed that my father had had a first wife and two sons. He was a
feeble, broken man, who seemed to my young fancy so old that in after
times it was always a shock to me to read on his tablet, "Percy Alison,
aged fifty-seven;" and I was but seven years old when he died under the
final blow of the loss of my little brother Percy from measles.

The dear old place--house with five gables on the garden front, black
timbered, and with white plaster between, and oh! such flowers in the
garden--was left to my mother for her life; and she was a great deal
younger than my father, so we went on living there, and it was only
when I was almost a woman that I came to the knowledge that the
property would never be mine, but would go in the male line to the son
of one of my disinherited convict brothers.

The story, as my mother knew it, was this: Their names were Ambrose and
Eustace: there was very little interval between their births, and there
had been some confusion between them during the first few hours of
their lives, so that the question of seniority was never entirely
clear, though Ambrose was so completely the leader and master that he
was always looked upon as the elder.

In their early youth they were led away by a man of Polish extraction,
though a British subject, one Count Prometesky, who had thrown himself
into every revolutionary movement on the Continent, had fought under
Kosciusko in Poland, joined the Carbonari in Italy, and at last
escaped, with health damaged by a wound, to teach languages and
military drawing in England, and, unhappily, to spread his principles
among his pupils, during the excitement connected with the Reform Bill.
Under his teaching my poor brothers became such democrats that they
actually married the two daughters of a man from Cumberland named
Lewthwayte, whom Lord Erymanth had turned out of one of his farms for
his insolence and radicalism; and not long after they were engaged in
the agricultural riots, drilling the peasants, making inflammatory
speeches, and doing all they could to bring on a revolut