cousins of Lucifer, and foster-brothers of
Beelzebub?'

'It was hard upon him,' remarked Reuben.

'On him! Nay, the hardship was all with us. If he with his eyes
open chose to marry the daughter of an incarnate devil like Will
Spotterbridge, because she chanced to be powdered and patched to his
liking, what reason hath he for complaint? It is we, who have the blood
of this Hector of the taverns grafted upon our own good honest stream,
who have most reason to lift up our voices.'

'Faith, by the same chain of reasoning,' said Reuben, 'one of my
ancestors must have married a woman with a plaguy dry throat, for both
my father and I are much troubled with the complaint.'

'You have assuredly inherited a plaguy pert tongue,' growled Saxon.
'From what I have told you, you will see that our whole life is a
conflict between our natural Saxon virtue and the ungodly impulses of
the Spotterbridge taint. That of which you have had cause to complain
yesternight is but an example of the evil to which I am subjected.'

'And your brothers and sisters?' I asked; 'how hath this circumstance
affected them?' The road was bleak and long, so that the old soldier's
gossip was a welcome break to the tedium of the journey.

'They have all succumbed,' said Saxon, with a groan. 'Alas, alas! they
were a goodly company could they have turned their talents to better
uses. Prima was our eldest born. She did well until she attained
womanhood. Secundus was a stout seaman, and owned his own vessel when
he was yet a young man. It was remarked, however, that he started on a
voyage in a schooner and came back in a brig, which gave rise to some
inquiry. It may be, as he said, that he found it drifting about in the
North Sea, and abandoned his own vessel in favour of it, but they hung
him before he could prove it. Tertia ran away with a north-country
drover, and hath been on the run ever since. Quartus and Nonus have been
long engaged in busying themselves over the rescue of the black folk
from their own benighted and heathen country, conveying them over by the
shipload to the plantations, where they may learn the beauties of the
Christian religion. They are, however, men of violent temper and profane
speech, who cherish no affection for their younger brother. Quintus was
a lad of promise, but he found a hogshead of rumbo which was thrown up
from a wreck, and he died soon afterwards. Sextus might have done well,
for he became clerk to Johnny Tranter th