. Once I
saw the faded sisters bending over the trunk together, and, as I
thought, embalming something in camphor. Curiosity impelled me to
linger, but, under some pretext, I was nodded out of the room.

Although my kinswomen's means were far from ample, they determined that
Swiftmouth College should have the distinction of calling me one of her
sons, and accordingly I was in due time sent for preparation to a
neighboring academy. Years of study and hard fare in country
boarding-houses told upon my self-importance as the descendant of a
great Englishman, notwithstanding all my letters from the honored three
came with counsel to "respect myself and keep up the dignity of the
family." Growing-up man forgets good counsel. The Arcadia of
respectability is apt to give place to the levity of football and other
low-toned accomplishments. The book of life, at that period, opens
readily at fun and frolic, and the insignia of greatness give the
school-boy no envious pangs.

I was nineteen when I entered the hoary halls of Swiftmouth. I call them
hoary, because they had been built more than fifty years. To me they
seemed uncommonly hoary, and I snuffed antiquity in the dusty purlieus.
I now began to study, in good earnest, the wisdom of the past. I saw
clearly the value of dead men and mouldy precepts, especially if the
former had been entombed a thousand years, and if the latter were well
done in sounding Greek and Latin. I began to reverence royal lines of
deceased monarchs, and longed to connect my own name, now growing into
college popularity, with some far-off mighty one who had ruled in pomp
and luxury his obsequious people. The trunk in Snowborough troubled my
dreams. In that receptacle still slept the proof of our family
distinction. "I will go," quoth I, "to the home of my aunts next
vacation and there learn _how_ we became mighty, and discover precisely
why we don't practice to-day our inherited claims to glory."

I went to Snowborough. Aunt Patience was now anxious to lay before her
impatient nephew the proof he burned to behold. But first she must
explain. All the old family documents and letters were, no doubt,
destroyed in the great fire of '98, as nothing in the shape of parchment
or paper implying nobility had ever been discovered in Snowborough, or
elsewhere. _But_ there had been preserved, for many years, a suit of
imperial clothes that had been worn, by their great-grandfather in
England, and, no doubt, in th