nd the less so, that he was a little ashamed of the peevishness
which he had displayed toward his well-meaning entertainer.

The general, therefore, followed Lord Woodville through several rooms,
into a long gallery hung with pictures, which the latter pointed out to
his guest, telling the names, and giving some account of the personages
whose portraits presented themselves in progression.

General Browne was but little interested in the details which these
accounts conveyed to him. They were, indeed, of the kind which are usually
found in an old family gallery. Here was a cavalier who had ruined the
estate in the royal cause; there, a fine lady who had reinstated it by
contracting a match with a wealthy Roundhead. There hung a gallant who had
been in danger for corresponding with the exiled Court at Saint Germain's;
here, one who had taken arms for William at the Revolution; and there, a
third that had thrown his weight alternately into the scale of Whig and
Tory.

While Lord Woodville was cramming these words into his guest's ear,
"against the stomach of his sense," they gained the middle of the gallery,
when he beheld General Browne suddenly start and assume an attitude of
the utmost surprise, not unmixed with fear, as his eyes were caught and
suddenly riveted by a portrait of an old lady in a sacque, the fashionable
dress at the end of the seventeenth century.

"There she is!" he exclaimed; "there she is, in form and features, though
inferior in demoniac expression to the hag that visited me last night!"

"If that be the case," said the young nobleman, "there can remain no
longer any doubt of the horrible reality of your apparition. That is the
picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and
fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter-chest. The
recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say that in yon
fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed. I will restore
it to the solitude to which the better judgment of those who preceded me
had consigned it; and never shall any one, so long as I can prevent it, be
exposed to a repetition of the supernatural horrors which could shake such
courage as yours."

Thus the friends, who had met with such glee, parted in a very different
mood; Lord Woodville to command the Tapestried Chamber to be unmantled and
the door built up, and General Browne to seek in some less beautiful
country, and with some less di