in love with him, and was finally wrecked
upon the coast of Africa, somewhere, as I believe, in the neighbourhood
of where Delagoa Bay now is, or rather to the north of it, he and his
wife being saved, and all the remainder of their company destroyed in
one way or another. Here they endured great hardships, but were at last
entertained by the mighty Queen of a savage people, a white woman of
peculiar loveliness, who, under circumstances which I cannot enter into,
but which you will one day learn, if you live, from the contents of
the box, finally murdered my ancestor Kallikrates. His wife, however,
escaped, how, I know not, to Athens, bearing a child with her, whom she
named Tisisthenes, or the Mighty Avenger. Five hundred years or more
afterwards, the family migrated to Rome under circumstances of which no
trace remains, and here, probably with the idea of preserving the idea
of vengeance which we find set out in the name of Tisisthenes, they
appear to have pretty regularly assumed the cognomen of Vindex, or
Avenger. Here, too, they remained for another five centuries or more,
till about 770 A.D., when Charlemagne invaded Lombardy, where they were
then settled, whereon the head of the family seems to have attached
himself to the great Emperor, and to have returned with him across the
Alps, and finally to have settled in Brittany. Eight generations later
his lineal representative crossed to England in the reign of Edward
the Confessor, and in the time of William the Conqueror was advanced to
great honour and power. From that time to the present day I can trace
my descent without a break. Not that the Vinceys--for that was the final
corruption of the name after its bearers took root in English soil--have
been particularly distinguished--they never came much to the fore.
Sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes merchants, but on the whole they
have preserved a dead level of respectability, and a still deader level
of mediocrity. From the time of Charles II. till the beginning of the
present century they were merchants. About 1790 by grandfather made a
considerable fortune out of brewing, and retired. In 1821 he died, and
my father succeeded him, and dissipated most of the money. Ten years ago
he died also, leaving me a net income of about two thousand a year. Then
it was that I undertook an expedition in connection with _that_," and he
pointed to the iron chest, "which ended disastrously enough. On my way
back I travelled in