ffed 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 practise 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 the New World also. These garments had been
carefully watched and guarded; for were they not the proof that their
owner belonged to a station in life, second, if second at all, to the
royal court of King George itself? Precious casket, into which I was
soon to have the privilege of gazing! Through how many long years these
fond, foolish virgins had lighted their unflickering lamps of
expectation and hope at this cherished old shrine!

I was now on my way to the family repository of all our greatness. I
went up stairs "on the jump." We all knelt down before the
well-preserved box; and my proud Aunt Patience, in a somewhat reverent
manner, turned the key. My heart,--I am not ashamed to confess it now,
although it is forty years since the quartette, in search of family
honors, were on their knees that summer afternoon in Snowborough,--my
heart beat high. I was about to look on that which might be a duke's or
an earl's regalia. And I was descended from the owner in a direct line!
I had lately been reading Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus"; and I
remembered, there before the trunk, the lines,--

"O sacred receptacle of my joys,
Sweet ce