sure of her good offices for the legislative
reception weeks in advance, and in all matters, save only Handsome
Ludlow, deferred anxiously to the great exemplar's code.

No one who thought twice about Mrs. Van Dam escaped the reflection that
she was a descendant, and Cora with her mind running continually on
this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this
truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her
discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as
asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all,
had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before Mrs. Van
Dam's august line of Dutch and English forebears, who had considerately
made history and bequeathed portraits and plate. But the path of
Japhet in search of a father was primrose beside the American's in
search of an ancestor, and Cora's researches were long barren of
result. The labyrinth of Brown, her maiden name, she speedily forsook,
though at the outset it seemed to run promisingly to knighthood,
literature, and art; Huggins, her mother's name, was impossible, and
Hilliard, more sounding, clearly out of the question; while the
Shelbys, to whom she turned in last resort, seemed hopelessly
commonplace. Ross's father, to her own knowledge, had done little but
drink; and the grandfather, though of sterner stuff, as became a
pioneer, was handicapped by his unlucky distillery. The governor's own
notions about his family were the vaguest. Like many Americans, he had
the impression that its beginnings traced to two brothers who
immigrated to this country prior to the Revolution in which they served.

"The Revolution seems to be the Norman Conquest of American genealogy,"
he remarked in the course of his wife's cross-examination.

"But don't you know their names, or what they did in the war?" she
queried anxiously.

Shelby shook his head.

"Perhaps they were teamsters," he laughed.

Cora was too pained to jest. Mrs. Van Dam was a "daughter" of this and
that society by virtue of descent from generals.

For a time the chase now circled teasingly round a southern branch
whose achievements were notable, but the unconcern of the distiller
with regard to vital statistics balked a happy union of North and
South, and goaded Cora to that last desperate ditch of the
ancestor-hunter--a blind leap over seas. In the fortunate isles where
choice forefathers flourish thick as butt