turn out to be a treasure
and just the thing for the new establishment. To begin with, there was
a love of a set of andirons and a brass fender (to reproduce
Josephine's description exactly), which had been discarded at the time
we began housekeeping as too old-fashioned and peculiar. Of equal
import was a disreputable-looking mahogany desk with brass handles and
claw feet which had belonged to my great-grandmother before it was
banished to the garret within a month after our wedding ceremony, on
the plea that none of the drawers would work. They don't still, for
that matter. A cumbersome, stately Dutch clock and a toast-rack of
what Josephine styled medieval pattern, were among the other
discoveries. The latter was reposing in a soap-box in company with a
battered, vulgar nutmeg-grater. But the pieces of resistance, as I
called them, on account of the difficulty we had in moving them from
behind a pile of old window-blinds, were the portraits of a little
gentleman in small-clothes, with his hair in a cue and a seeming cast
in one eye, and a stout lady with a high complexion and corkscrew
ringlets.

"Oh, Fred, who are they?" cried Josephine, ecstatically, and she began
to dust the seedy, frameless canvases with a reverential air. "Where
did they come from?"

"They're ancestors of mine, love."

"Ancestors? How lovely, Fred! I didn't know you had any. I mean I
didn't know you had any who had their portraits painted."

"On the contrary, Josephine, I told you who they were when we were
engaged, and I remember I was rather anxious to hang them in the
dining-room, but you said they were a pair of old frumps, and that you
wouldn't give them house space. So we compromised on the attic."

"Did I?" said my darling, gravely. "Well it must have been because the
dining-room was too small for them. They will look delightfully in our
new one, when they are mounted and touched up a bit, and they will set
off our Copley of my great-aunt in the turban. What are their names?
They must have names."

"They are my great-grandfather Plunkett and his wife, on my father's
side. He was a common hangman."

"Now don't be idiotic, Fred."

"He was, my dear. It was you yourself who said it. Don't you remember
my calling two of your forbears a precious pair of donkeys because they
wouldn't eat any form of shell-fish, and your replying that, though I
was in the habit of grandiloquently describing my ancestor who used to
exec