lood of princes in her
veins. Generations back,--how we children used to reckon the thing
over!--she was cradled in a throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they
were,--the Stuarts; and the most devout genealogist might deem it
dubious honor to own them for great-grand-fathers by innumerable degrees
removed. So she used to tell us, over and over, as a damper on our
childish vanity, looking such a very queen as she spoke, in every play
of feature, and every motion of her hand, that it was the old story of
preachers who did not practise. The very baby was proud of her. The
beauty of a face, and the elegant repose of a manner, are influences by
no means more unfelt at three years than at thirty.

As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out,--while
old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in
their footsteps safe and free,--and start into life, and claim its own
when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a
single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and
criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;--so, I
have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and
tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little
New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood
refined and ennobled, in my mother, into royalty.

A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she knew its worth, in
every fibre of her heart; scholarly parents had blessed her with their
legacies of scholarly mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she
quivered under every grace and every defect; and the blessing of a
beauty as rare as rich had been given to her. With every instinct of her
nature recoiling from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at, the
family record had been stainless for a generation. God had indeed
blessed her; but the very blessing was a temptation.

I knew, before she left me, what she might have been, but for the
merciful and tender watch of Him who was despised and rejected of men. I
know, for she told me, one still night when we were alone together, how
she sometimes shuddered at herself, and what those daily and hourly
struggles between her nature and her Christianity _meant_.

I think we were as near to one another as mother and daughter can be,
but yet as different. Since I have been talking in