s were glad to accept
the offer of a relative to take charge of Emily, the second daughter. A
very proud old lady was this maiden aunt, and over the mantel-piece of
her drawing-room ever hung a great diagram, a family tree, which mightily
impressed the warm imagination of the delicate child she had taken in
charge. It was a lengthy and well-grown family tree, tracing back the
Morris family to the days of Charlemagne, and branching out from a stock
of "the seven kings of France". Was there ever yet a decayed. Irish
family that did not trace itself back to some "kings"? and these
"Milesian kings"--who had been expelled from France, doubtless for good
reasons, and who had sailed across the sea and landed in fair Erin, and
there had settled and robbed and fought--did more good 800 years after
their death than they did, I expect, during their ill-spent lives, if
they proved a source of gentle harmless pride to the old maiden lady who
admired their names over her mantel-piece in the earlier half of the
present century. And, indeed, they acted as a kind of moral thermometer,
in a fashion that would much have astonished their ill-doing and
barbarous selves. For my mother has told me how when she would commit
some piece of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking gravely
over her spectacles at the small culprit: "Emily, your conduct is
unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily, with
her sweet grey Irish eyes, and her curling masses of raven-black hair,
would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some vague idea
that those royal, and to her very real ancestors, would despise her small
sweet rosebud self, as wholly unworthy of their disreputable majesties.
But that same maiden aunt trained the child right well, and I keep ever
grateful memory of her, though I never knew her, for her share in forming
the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest, noblest woman I have ever
known. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she
loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more
keenly sensitive on every question of honor, more iron in will, more
sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as
dreamland, who guarded me until my marriage from every touch of pain that
she could ward off, or could bear for me, who suffered more in every
trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in
the little house I had taken for ou