l was disconsolate.

"She beat her breasts and tore her hair, and, separating
herself from the English ladies in her train, took the
road to Brunswick, where she remained in close seclusion
about three months."

Returning to England, to the only solace left to her--her
money-bags--she spent the last seventeen years of her life alternating
between her villas at Twickenham and Isleworth. George had promised her
that if she survived him, and if it were possible, he would revisit her
from the spirit world.

"When," to quote Walpole again, "one day a large raven
flew into one of the windows of her villa at Isleworth,
she was persuaded that it was the soul of the departed
monarch, and received and treated it with all the respect
and tenderness of duty, till the Royal bird or she took
their last flight."

Thus, shorn of all her powers and splendour, in obscurity, and hoarding
her ill-gotten gold, died the most remarkable woman who has ever figured
in the British Peerage. Her vast fortune was divided between her two
"nieces," one of whom, created by her father, George, Countess of
Walsingham, became the wife of that polished courtier and heartless man
of the world, Philip, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.

CHAPTER XXV

THE ROMANCE OF FAMILY TREES

Such are a few of the scenes which arrest the eyes as the panorama of
our aristocracy passes before them; but it would require a library of
volumes to do anything like adequate justice to the infinite variety of
the dramas it presents. There is for instance a whole realm of romance
in the origins of our noble families whose proud palaces are often
reared on the most ignoble of foundations; and whose family trees
flaunt, with questionable pride, many a spurious branch, while burying
from view the humble roots from which they derive their lordly growth.

Although Cobden's assertion that "the British aristocracy was cradled
behind city counters" errs on the side of exaggeration, there is no
doubt that in the veins of scores of the proudest English peers runs the
blood of ancestors who served customers in City shops.

When, a couple of centuries ago, John Baring, son of the Bremen Lutheran
parson, Dr Franz Baring, opened his small cloth manufactory on the
outskirts of Exeter, his most extravagant ambition was to build up a
business which he could hand over to his sons, and to provide a few
comforts for his old age; if any o