r, peacefully, and side by side, speaking
seldom of that great gap in my life when we were lost to each other and
of all that then befell. At length the end came. My wife died suddenly
in her sleep in the eighty-seventh year of her age. I buried her on the
south side of the church here, with sorrow indeed, but not with sorrow
inconsolable, for I know that I must soon rejoin her, and those others
whom I have loved.

There in that wide heaven are my mother and my sister and my sons;
there are great Guatemoc my friend, last of the emperors, and many other
companions in war who have preceded me to peace; there, too, though she
doubted of it, is Otomie the beautiful and proud. In the heaven which
I trust to reach, all the sins of my youth and the errors of my age
notwithstanding, it is told us there is no marrying and giving in
marriage; and this is well, for I do not know how my wives, Montezuma's
daughter and the sweet English gentlewoman, would agree together were it
otherwise.

And now to my task.

CHAPTER II

OF THE PARENTAGE OF THOMAS WINGFIELD

I, Thomas Wingfield, was born here at Ditchingham, and in this very room
where I write to-day. The house of my birth was built or added to early
in the reign of the seventh Henry, but long before his time some kind of
tenement stood here, which was lived in by the keeper of the vineyards,
and known as Gardener's Lodge. Whether it chanced that the climate was
more kindly in old times, or the skill of those who tended the fields
was greater, I do not know, but this at the least is true, that the
hillside beneath which the house nestles, and which once was the bank
of an arm of the sea or of a great broad, was a vineyard in Earl Bigod's
days. Long since it has ceased to grow grapes, though the name of the
'Earl's Vineyard' still clings to all that slope of land which lies
between this house and a certain health-giving spring that bubbles from
the bank the half of a mile away, in the waters of which sick folks come
to bathe even from Norwich and Lowestoft. But sheltered as it is from
the east winds, to this hour the place has the advantage that gardens
planted here are earlier by fourteen days than any others in the country
side, and that a man may sit in them coatless in the bitter month of
May, when on the top of the hill, not two hundred paces hence, he must
shiver in a jacket of otterskins.

The Lodge, for so it has always been named, in its beginnings having
been