mbers chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in
order to acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for,
they have got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry
down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely of
your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I
now do.

I was born without teeth--and there Richard III had the advantage of
me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the
advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously
honest.

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame
contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave
it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read
had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have
been a felicitous thing, for the reading public. How does it strike you?

AWFUL, TERRIBLE MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

CHAPTER I. THE SECRET REVEALED.

It was night. Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of
Klugenstein. The year 1222 was drawing to a close. Far away up in
the tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered. A secret
council was being held there. The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in a
chair of state meditating. Presently he said, with a tender accent:

"My daughter!"

A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,
answered:

"Speak, father!"

"My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that
hath puzzled all your young life. Know, then, that it had its birth in
the matters which I shall now unfold. My brother Ulrich is the great
Duke of Brandenburgh. Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if
no son were born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house,
provided a son were born to me. And further, in case no son were born to
either, but only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's
daughter, if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should
succeed, if she retained a blameless name. And so I, and my old wife
here, prayed fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was
vain. You were born to us. I was in despair. I saw the mighty prize
slipping from my grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away. And I had
been so hopeful! Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his
wife