Letter Number Twenty-five

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_ LONDON

Here we are in this wonderful town, where, if you can't see everything you want to see, you can generally see a sample of it, even if your fad happens to be the ancientnesses of Egypt. We are at the Babylon Hotel, where we shall stay until it is time to start for Southampton, where we shall take the steamer for home. What we are going to do between here and Southampton I don't know yet; but I do know that Jone is all on fire with joy because he thinks his journeys are nearly over, and I am chilled with grief when I think that my journeys are nearly over.

We left Edinburgh on the train called the "Flying Scotsman," and it deserved its name. I suppose that in the days of Wallace and Bruce and Rob Roy the Scots must often have skipped along in a lively way; but I am sure if any of them had ever invaded England at the rate we went into it, the British lion would soon have been living on thistles instead of roses.

The speed of this train was sometimes a mile a minute, I think; and I am sure I was never on any railroad in America where I was given a shorter time to get out for something to eat than we had at York. Jone and I are generally pretty quick about such things, but we had barely time to get back to our carriage before that "Flying Scotsman" went off like a streak of lightning.

On the way we saw a part of York Minster, and had a splendid, view of Durham Cathedral, standing high in the unreachable--that is, as far as I was concerned. Peterborough Cathedral we also saw the outside of, and I felt like a boy looking in at a confectioner's window with no money to buy anything. It wasn't money that I wanted; it was time, and we had very little of that left.

The next day, after we reached London, I set out to attend to a piece of business that I didn't want Jone to know anything about. My business was to look up my family pedigree. It seemed to me that it would be a shame if I went away from the home of my ancestors without knowing something about those ancestors and about the links that connected me with them. So I determined to see what I could do in the way of making up a family tree.

By good luck, Jone had some business to attend to about money and rooms on the steamer, and so forth, and so I could start out by myself without his even asking me where I was going. Now, of course, it would be a natural thing for a person to go and seek out his ancestors in the ancient village from which they sprang, and to read their names on the tombstones in the venerable little church, but as I didn't know where this village was, of course I couldn't go to it. But in London is the place where you can find out how to find out such things.

[Illustration: "A PERSON WHO WAS A FAMILY-TREE-MAN"]

As far back as when we was in Chedcombe I had had a good deal of talk with Miss Pondar about ancestors and families. I told her that my forefathers came from this country, which I was very sure of, judging from my feelings; but as I couldn't tell her any particulars, I didn't go into the matter very deep. But I did say there was a good many points that I would like to set straight, and asked her if she knew where I could find out something about English family trees. She said she had heard there was a big heraldry office in London, but if I didn't want to go there, she knew of a person who was a family-tree-man. He had an office in London, and his business was to go around and tend to trees of that kind which had been neglected, and to get them into shape and good condition. She gave me his address, and I had kept the thing quiet in my mind until now.

I found the family-tree-man, whose name was Brandish, in a small room not too clean, over a shop not far from St. Paul's Churchyard. He had another business, which related to patent poison for flies, and at first he thought I had come to see him about that, but when he found out I wanted to ask him about my family tree his face brightened up.

When I told Mr. Brandish my business the first thing he asked me was my family name. Of course I had expected this, and I had thought a great deal about the answer I ought to give. In the first place, I didn't want to have anything to do with my father's name. I never had anything much to do with him, because he died when I was a little baby, and his name had nothing high-toned about it, and it seemed to me to belong to that kind of a family that you would be better satisfied with the less you looked up its beginnings; but my mother's family was a different thing. Nobody could know her without feeling that she had sprung from good roots. It might have been from the stump of a tree that had been cut down, but the roots must have been of no common kind to send up such a shoot as she was. It was from her that I got my longings for the romantic.

She used to tell me a good deal about her father, who must have been a wonderful man in many ways. What she told me was not like a sketch of his life, which I wish it had been, but mostly anecdotes of what he said and did. So it was my mother's ancestral tree I determined to find, and without saying whether it was on my mother's or father's side I was searching for ancestors, I told Mr. Brandish that Dork was the family name.

"Dork," said he; "a rather uncommon name, isn't it? Was your father the eldest son of a family of that name?"

Now I was hoping he wouldn't say anything about my father.

"No, sir," said I; "it isn't that line that I am looking up. It is my mother's. Her name was Dork before she was married."

"Really! Now I see," said he, "you have the paternal line all correct, and you want to look up the line on the other side. That is very common; it is so seldom that one knows the line of ancestors on one's maternal side. Dork, then, was the name of your maternal grandfather."

It struck me that a maternal grandfather must be a grandmother, but I didn't say so.

"Can you tell me," said he, "whether it was he who emigrated from this country to America, or whether it was his father or his grandfather?"

Now I hadn't said anything about the United States, for I had learned there was no use in wasting breath telling English people I had come from America, so I wasn't surprised at his question, but I couldn't answer it.

"I can't say much about that," I said, "until I have found out something about the English branches of the family."

"Very good," said he. "We will look over the records," and he took down a big book and turned to the letter D. He ran his finger down two or three pages, and then he began to shake his head.

"Dork?" said he. "There doesn't seem to be any Dork, but here is Dorkminster. Now if that was your family name we'd have it all here. No doubt you know all about that family. It's a grand old family, isn't it? Isn't it possible that your grandfather or one of his ancestors may have dropped part of the name when he changed his residence to America?"

Now I began to think hard; there was some reason in what the family-tree-man said. I knew very well that the same family name was often different in different countries, changes being made to suit climates and people.

"Minster has a religious meaning, hasn't it?" said I.

"Yes, madam," said he; "it relates to cathedrals and that sort of thing."

Now, so far as I could remember, none of the things my mother had ever told me about her father was in any ways related to religion. They was mostly about horses; and although there is really no reason for the disconnection between horses and religion, especially when you consider the hymns with heavenly chariots in them must have had horses, it didn't seem to me that my grandfather could have made it a point of being religious, and perhaps he mightn't have cared for the cathedral part of his name, and so might have dropped it for convenience in signing, probably being generally in a hurry, judging from what my mother had told me. I said as much to Mr. Brandish, and he answered that he thought it was likely enough, and that that sort of thing was often done.

"Now, then," said he, "let us look into the Dorkminster line and trace out your connection with that. From what place did your ancestors come?"

It seemed to me that he was asking me a good deal more than he was telling me, and I said to him: "That is what I want to find out. What is the family home of the Dorkminsters?"

"Oh, they were a great Hampshire family," said he. "For five hundred years they lived on their estates in Hampshire. The first of the name was Sir William Dorkminster, who came over with the Conqueror, and most likely was given those estates for his services. Then we go on until we come to the Duke of Dorkminster, who built a castle, and whose brother Henry was made bishop and founded an abbey, which I am sorry to say doesn't now exist, being totally destroyed by Oliver Cromwell."

You cannot imagine how my blood leaped and surged within me as I listened to those words. William the Conqueror! An ancestral abbey! A duke! "Is the family castle still standing?" said I.

"It fell into ruins," said he, "during the reign of Charles I., and even its site is now uncertain, the park having been devoted to agricultural purposes. The fourth Duke of Dorkminster was to have commanded one of the ships which destroyed the Spanish Armada, but was prevented by a mortal fever which cut him off in his prime; he died without issue, and the estates passed to the Culverhams of Wilts."

"Did that cut off the line?" said I, very quick.

"Oh, no," said the family-tree man, "the line went on. One of the duke's younger sisters must have married a man on condition that he took the old family name, which is often done, and her descendants must have emigrated somewhere, for the name no longer appears in Hampshire; but probably not to America, for that was rather early for English emigration."

"Do you suppose," said I, "that they went to Scotland?"

"Very likely," said he, after thinking a minute; "that would be probable enough. Have you reason to suppose that there was a Scotch branch in your family?"

"Yes," said I, for it would have been positively wrong in me to say that the feelings that I had for the Scotch hadn't any meaning at all.

"Now then," said Mr. Brandish, "there you are, madam. There is a line all the way down from the Conqueror to the end of the sixteenth century, scarcely one man's lifetime before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock."

I now began to calculate in my mind. I was thirty years old; my mother, most likely, was about as old when I was born; that made sixty years. Then my grandfather might have been forty when my mother was born, and there was a century. As for my great-grandfather and his parents, I didn't know anything about them. Of course, there must have been such persons, but I didn't know where they came from or where they went to.

"I can go back a century," said I, "but that doesn't begin to meet the end of the line you have marked out. There's a gap of about two hundred years."

"Oh, I don't think I would mind that," said Mr. Brandish. "Gaps of that kind are constantly occurring in family trees. In fact, if we was to allow gaps of a century or so to interfere with the working out of family lines, it would cut off a great many noble ancestries from families of high position, especially in the colonies and abroad. I beg you not to pay any attention to that, madam."

My nerves was tingling with the thought of the Spanish Armada, and perhaps Bannockburn (which then made me wish I had known all this before I went to Stirling, but which battle, now as I write, I know must have been fought a long time before any of the Dorks went to Scotland), and I expect my eyes flashed with family pride, for do what I would I couldn't sit calm and listen to what I was hearing. But, after all, that two hundred years did weigh upon my mind. "If you make a family tree for me," said I, "you will have to cut off the trunk and begin again somewhere up in the air."

"Oh, no," said he, "we don't do that. We arrange the branches so that they overlap each other, and the dotted lines which indicate the missing portions are not noticed. Then, after further investigation and more information, the dots can be run together and the tree made complete and perfect."

Of course, I had nothing more to say, and he promised to send me the tree the next morning, though, of course, requesting me to pay him in advance, which was the rule of the office, and you would be amazed, madam, if you knew how much that tree cost. I got it the next morning, but I haven't shown it to Jone yet. I am proud that I own it, and I have thrills through me whenever my mind goes back to its Norman roots; but I am bound to say that family trees sometimes throw a good deal of shade over their owners, especially when they have gaps in them, which seems contrary to nature, but is true to fact. _

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