an Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--"

"Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated
to trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or
Elizabeth."

At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt's eye; but I did
not, and I continued imprudently:--

"Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present
to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do
about--"

"Augustus!"

She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have
alluded above.

It was I who was now silent.

"Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room."

"Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--"

"I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, when
I am trying to do something for you."

I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the
possible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt
was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broached
her favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy,
beginning with her own.

"If your title to royal blood," she said, "were as plain as mine
(through Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful
research."

She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not
one family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that
a grandmother of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and there
were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for
me was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was
Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance,
then I was no king's descendant.

"Worthy New England people, I understand," said my Aunt with her nod of
indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, "but
of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was
a mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of those
infamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such
cattle could you be one of us," said my Aunt.

But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought
in some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was
reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.
In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men, these
were what I must search, and for thes