h, handsome, I am
assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even
to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and
inches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the
familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral
stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can
pronounce a single word, my name, "Augustus!" in a tone that renders
further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of
certain newcomers in our society, "I don't know them." She can make
her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "take
umbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to take
outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all
Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was
talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English
religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews
wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James
had--"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give you
her own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and
by this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no
grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to
every-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers
and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to
nothing and back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty and
improving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola.
Of course, with Uncle Andrew's money, she does not live in a
boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place her
before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very
public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.

"Upon your mother's side of the family," she said, "of course."

"Me!" I did not have to feign amazement.

My Aunt was silent. "Me descended from a king?"

My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. "There seems to be the
possibility of it."

"Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?"

"I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?"

It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit,
that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often
rouse in me.

"And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?"

"If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The
Americ