"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.
