ew and so clean and so gay, with my books ranged in neat
shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the window,
shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open: you scent
the flowers and the new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his dear
mother are all alone.

"My dear, my dear, you ask so many questions at once!"

"Don't answer them, then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins does
with her fairy tales, 'Once on a time.'

"Once on a time, then," said my mother, kissing me between the
eyes,--"once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in
Cumberland who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys
were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage, on
the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin with one tower left, and this, with
half the country round it, had once belonged to the clergyman's family;
but all had been sold,--all gone piece by piece, you see, my dear,
except the presentation to the living (what they call the advowson was
sold too), which had been secured to the last of the family. The elder
of these sons was your Uncle Roland; the younger was your father. Now
I believe the first quarrel arose from the absurdist thing possible,
as your father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things
connected with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old
pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of
knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began, I know not, but it
seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam
de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the pedigree went regularly
from father to son till Henry V. Then, apparently from the disorders
produced, as your father says, by the Wars of the Roses, there was a sad
blank left,--only one or two names, without dates or marriages, till the
time of Henry VIL, except that in the reign of Edward IV. there was
one insertion of a William Caxton (named in a deed). Now in the village
church there was a beautiful brass monument to one Sir William de
Caxton, who had been killed at the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that
wicked king Richard III. And about the same time there lived, as you
know, the great printer, William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to
be in town on a visit to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all
the old papers he could find at the Heralds' College; and, sure enough,
he was overjoyed to satisfy himself that he was descen