down a strain of
Spanish blood to warm us up. Also, according to tradition, this one or
another--Geoffrey Clement, by name--helped to sentence Charles to death.

I have not examined into these traditions myself, partly because I was
indolent, and partly because I was so busy polishing up this end of the
line and trying to make it showy; but the other Clemenses claim that
they have made the examination and that it stood the test. Therefore I
have always taken for granted that I did help Charles out of his
troubles, by ancestral proxy. My instincts have persuaded me, too.
Whenever we have a strong and persistent and ineradicable instinct, we
may be sure that it is not original with us, but inherited--inherited
from away back, and hardened and perfected by the petrifying influence
of time. Now I have been always and unchangingly bitter against Charles,
and I am quite certain that this feeling trickled down to me through the
veins of my forebears from the heart of that judge; for it is not my
disposition to be bitter against people on my own personal account I am
not bitter against Jeffreys. I ought to be, but I am not. It indicates
that my ancestors of James II's time were indifferent to him; I do not
know why; I never could make it out; but that is what it indicates. And
I have always felt friendly toward Satan. Of course that is ancestral;
it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.

... And so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of
Clemenses who said they had examined the records, I have always been
obliged to believe that Geoffrey Clement the martyr-maker was an
ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, and in fact pride. This
has not had a good effect upon me, for it has made me vain, and that is
a fault. It has made me set myself above people who were less fortunate
in their ancestry than I, and has moved me to take them down a peg, upon
occasion, and say things to them which hurt them before company.

A case of the kind happened in Berlin several years ago. William Walter
Phelps was our Minister at the Emperor's Court, then, and one evening he
had me to dinner to meet Count S., a cabinet minister. This nobleman was
of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact
that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of
their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to
work them in in a way that would look sufficientl