hurch, and beside the
little brook where the crimsoned mosses grow thick and wet and cool,
from which I cannot call her. It is all I have left of her now. But
after all, it is not of her that you will chiefly care to hear. The
object of my story is simply to acquaint you with a few facts, which,
though interwoven with the events of her life, are quite independent of
it as objects of interest. It is, I know, only my own heart that makes
these pages a memorial,--but, you see, I cannot help it.

Yet, I confess, no glamour of any earthly love has ever utterly dazzled
me,--not even hers. Of imperfections, of mistakes, of sins, I knew she
was guilty. I know it now,--even with the sanctity of those crimsoned
mosses, and the hush of the rest beneath, so close to my heart, I cannot
forget them. Yet somehow--I do not know how--the imperfections, the
mistakes, the very sins, bring her nearer to me as the years slip by,
and make her dearer.

The key to her life is the key to my story. That given, as I can give
it, I will try to compress. It lies in the fact that my mother was what
we call an aristocrat, I do not like the term, as the term is used. I am
sure she does not now; but I have no other word. She was a royal-looking
woman, and she had the blood of princes in her veins. Generations
back--how we children used to reckon the thing over!--she was cradled in
a throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they were,--the Stuarts; and the
most devout genealogist might deem it dubious honor to own them for
great-grandfathers by innumerable degrees removed. So she used to tell
us, over and over, as a damper on our childish vanity, looking such a
very queen as she spoke, in every play of feature, and every motion of
her hand, that it was the old story of preachers who did not practise.
The very baby was proud of her. The beauty of a face, and the elegant
repose of a manner, are by no means influences more unfelt at three
years than at thirty.

As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out,--while
old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in
their footsteps safe and free,--and start into life, and claim its own
when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a
single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and
criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;--so, I
have s