half-sister, represented the family in 1810, rode in on
every week-day to their Bank-office in Axcester High Street,--a
Georgian house of brick, adorned with a porch of plaster fluted to the
shape of a sea-shell, out of which a. Cupid smiled down upon a brass
plate and the inscription "WESTCOTE AND WESTCOTE," and on the first
floor, with windows as tall as the rooms, so that from the street you
could see through one the shapely legs of Mr. Endymion Westcote at his
knee-hole table, and through another the legs of Mr. Narcissus. The
third and midmost window was a dummy, having been bricked up to avoid
the window-tax imposed by Mr. Pitt--in whose statesmanship, however,
the brothers had firmly believed. Their somewhat fantastic names were
traditional in the Westcote pedigree and dated from, the seventeenth
century.

Endymion, the elder, (who took the lead of Narcissus in all, things),
was the fine flower of the Westcote stocks, and, out of question, the
most influential man in Axcester and for many a mile round justice of
the Peace for the county of Somerset and Major of its Yeomanry, he
served "our town," (so he called it) as Overseer of the Poor, Governor
of the Grammar School, Chairman of Feoffees, Churchwarden, everything
in short but Mayor--an office which he left to the tradesmen, while
taking care to speak of it always with respect, and indeed to see it
properly filled. The part of County Magistrate--to which he had been
born--he played to perfection, and with a full sense of its dignified
amenity. (It was whispered that the Lord Lieutenant himself stood in
some awe of him.) His favourite character, however, was that of plain
citizen of his native town. "I'm an Axcester man," he would declare in
his public speeches, and in his own way he loved and served the little
borough. For its good he held its Parliamentary representation in the
hollow of his hand; and, as Overseer of the Poor, had dared public
displeasure by revising the Voters' List and defying a mandamus of the
Court of King's Bench rather than allow Axcester to fail in its duty
of returning two members to support Mr. Percevall's Ministry. In 1800,
when the price of wheat rose to 184s a quarter, a poor woman dropped
dead in the market place of starvation. At once a mob collected,
hoisted a quartern-loaf on a pole with the label--"We will have Bread
or Blood," and started to pillage the shop's in High Street. It was
Endymion Westcote who rode up single-hande