pected and stunning blow--for Reginald Monfort was devoted, in his
chivalric way, to his beautiful and fragile wife, as it was, indeed, his
nature to be to every thing that was his own. Her very dependence had
endeared her to him, nor had she known probably to what straits her
exactions had driven him, nor what were his exigencies. Perhaps (let me
strive to do her this justice, at least), had he been more open on these
subjects, matters might have gone better. Yet he found consolation in
the reflection that she had been happy in her ignorance of his affairs,
and had experienced no strict privation during their short union,
inevitably as this must later have been her portion, and certainly as,
in her case, misery must have accompanied it.

Her child, in the absence of all near relatives, became his charge, and
the little three-year-old girl, her mother's image, grew into his
closest affections by reason of this likeness and her very helplessness.
Two years after the death of his wife, he espoused my mother, a bright
and beautiful woman of his own age, with whom he met casually at a
banker's dinner in London, and who, fascinated by his Christian graces,
reached her fair Judaic hand over all lines of Purim prejudice, and
placed it confidingly in his own for life, thereby, as I have said,
relinquishing home and kindred forever.

A hundred thousand pounds was a great fortune in those days and in our
then modest republic, and this was the sum my parents brought with them
from England--a heritage sufficiently large to have enriched a numerous
family in America, but which was chiefly centred on one alone, as will
be shown.

My father, a proud, shy, fastidious man, had always been galled by the
consciousness of my mother's Israelitish descent, which she never
attempted to conceal or deny, although, to please his sensitive
requisitions, she dispensed with most of its open observances. That she
clung to it with unfailing tenacity to the last I cannot doubt, however,
from memorials written in her own hand--a very characteristic one--and
from the testimony of Mrs. Austin, her faithful friend and
attendant--the nurse, let me mention here, of my father's little
step-daughter during her mother's lifetime, and her brief orphanage, as
well as of his succeeding children.

Stanch in his love of church and country, we, his daughters, were all
three christened, and "brought up," as it is termed, in the Episcopal
Church, and early taught