to the manner in which it was borne. He would | I to myself. There, before me, lay a large silhave taken health by storm, but his superior officer commanded a siege, believing a forlorn hope the inevitable result of the former. In the mean while, as the old ballad says, "My purse was getting low,

ver ladle on its velvet cushions, its bowl, lined with gold, shining and reflecting magnificently, its handle studded with jewels that glanced like so many eyes of various hues and meaning. He lifted it tenderly, and disclosed a world of bassrelief and chasing upon the underside of the bowl; tiny fawns and satyrs, bacchantes and grape-gatherers, reeling under their baskets of fruit, and every symbol of wine and the revel that an exuberant imagination could invent while at the brim a bird, in wrought silver, poised to taste; a bee hovered there, lured by the fragrance; a girl dipped with her bucket below, and a little urchin paddled with his feet inside. Vine tendrils that had wreathed the cup with glistening leaves intertwined and formed the handle, dropping here and there a bunch of grapes, each an amythest or chrysolite, and terminating at the top in an oval surrounded with diamonds and bearing the 'scutcheon of the De Veres.

And to the highway I was forced to go!" Which, being modernized and inverted, means to the pawnbroker's, with rings, brooches, and jeweled trinkets; for this illness had been a very confiscation act, had swallowed sovereigns with the equanimity of a cannibal or a juggler! There were wines and jellies and other delicacies to be procured for the invalid, besides bread and butter for the children; and for all that my store of valuables didn't scruple to exhaust itself nor the pawnbroker to cheat me, and accordingly one day found me at my wit's end and my moncy's too. From whence should arrive the next bottle of wine or loaf of bread, not to mention butter, was beyond my arithmetical or financial calculations. I took the problem to bed with me, and a most uncomfortable bedfellow it proved; as often as I turned it in my mind I turned myself in my bed, and management nor imagina- "It is very old, I understand-an heir-loom. tion could contrive a plausible answer. Thus Ah, madame! it is worth a fortune. Your grandthe night dragged on, and the dawn crept up mother has told me of it; it has been in her famthe horizon, and the earliest birds sang good-ily four hundred years, it was her wedding dowmorning to each other; and just as from far and er. Your grandmother was a De Vere-fine near there bubbled up, as if out of the overflow-name!" I remembered Egmont's remark then, ing heart of nature, drawn by some incanta- that the old Dutch merchants gave their daughtion of day, a thousand little rills of melody, I ters a tulip bulb as dower, and I said as calmly dropped asleep; and in my dream grandmother as I could command: Engelhardt came to me.

"The Engelhardts were always a proud and willful race," she said; "now that you're at the bottom of your casket, perhaps you will discover what is at the bottom of your kinsmen's hearts; at all events, go and get your spoon before you

starve."

So I made my toilet in my dream, and departed to Louis. He bustled up to me with instant recognition.

"Mr. Louis, my grandmother left me a spoon here?"

"Which you wish to carry away with you? One minute." And he disappeared. "Bah! what a flourish about a spoon," I thought. "I wonder if it will allow of partridges, or only a chop;" for you see I was determined to die game. Presently he came from an inner room, bearing a kid case that would have held the silver mines of Peru, I fancied. "I may as well see one of the seven wonders, so long as it costs nothing," I thought again; "but you're putting yourself to a great deal of trouble, Monsieur Louis. My dinner doesn't lurk in that cavern. It would be like hunting for a needle in a hay-mow." All this time he was unhasping it and examining the name on the lid.

"Thought I couldn't mistake," he said; "you have never seen it, madame? No, it was placed here the week you were born; it's a superb piece of work. One of the little figures had got bent; see I straightened it!" Was the man insane, or was I not fairly awakened from my sleep? said

I thought of the sun, moon, and stars that Emily had suggested as grandmamma's gift; and if I was silent, Louis was voluble.

"Yes, that's a good while. The family of Macleod, you may recollect, have a drinkingcup belonging to their ancestors when they were Kings of the Isle of Man."

So the ladle and I found ourselves at home; and whom should I meet at my own door but Jerome? He had never crossed its threshold before. He had made money of late of a surety, in two ways, speculation and marriage; or perhaps they were both included in the first. But now I confronted him with my grandmother's legacy.

"There's my silver spoon that you all made much of!"

"Humph! it's nothing new to me. I bent the urchin back myself to see if his feet wouldn't fly up, when I was a lad. Odd fish these De Veres and Engelhardts, to let a fortune rust out in a spoon! Didn't you know what it was ?"

"Did you?" "Yes. Supposed you had it in your parlor cup-board all this time."

"You increase in amiability upon closer acquaintance. Do you wish to purchase?"

"Purchase! Do you think I'm King Midas himself? That silver spoon is worth an army contract; you can afford to go home to faderland now, and live in the ancestral castles." But you

"That's nothing to the purpose. have had army contracts, and if you don't want the heir-loom to leave the family, prevent it!" "Can't do it. Had a speculation fail the other day."

"Which? Did she have her money secured character. All the chairs not on their backs to herself?"

"No, thank you; I've had some experience the floor in danger from the heel of the oppressof your financial abilities." or. It was very lucky I hadn't named him. "Max," said I, "I've found a name for baby."

"Accumulating? what, the spoon ?” And I tossed aside its cabalistic-looking wrap-ning Calculator" of a man's titles to respect. pings in order to inspect a spoon of that peculiar character. Mr. Louis arrested them.

sion of strange and moving accidents which have family to prevent the utter ruin of the estates, befallen great houses, as well as various person- he having by desperate prodigality alienated al anecdotes concerning individual notabilities; possession after possession. This Earl's only and these entertaining items of gossip Sir Ber- child was a daughter, who came up wholly unnard gives us in one form and another from out cared for, receiving no education, and being his "Record Tower in Dublin Castle." If you allowed to run wild like a gipsy. She eloped have the privilege of visiting him there you will with a common crier, and at one time lived note with how fatherly an interest he surveys wholly by begging, finally becoming a regular his family, the aristocracy, patting this member "tramp." In the middle of the next century, kindly on the shoulder, repressing the assump- the eighteenth, we find another David, the untions of that one, and adverting with bated questionable head of the great house of Lindbreath of awe to the eminent standing of a say, an hostler at an inn at Kirkwall, in the third. The Ulster King of Arms will point you Orkney Islands. The earldom, by some ina moral and adorn you a tale from out his am- comprehensible shifting, had passed to another ple resources at a moment's notice. His well-branch, leaving this old man of eighty to die in

filled stores of anecdote furnish us now with a stable.
more materials than we can use in illustrating
the vicissitudes of families.

The decay and extinction of great houses and the disappearance of titles form sad illustrations of that law of change which is said to be even altering the shape of the earth. Not one of the earldoms conferred by William of Normandy after the battle of Hastings now exists; not one of the honors conferred by William Rufus, Henry I., Stephen, Henry II., Richard I., or John. Of the English dukedoms created down to the commencement of the reign of Charles II. only Norfolk and Somerset and Cornwall remain. Winchester and Worcester are the only marquessates older than the reign of George III. The earl's coronet was very frequently bestowed under the Henrys and the Edwards; and yet, of all the earldoms created by the Normans, the Plantaganets, and the Tudors eleven only remain, six of these being merged in higher honors; so that now the only ones giving independent designation are Shrewsbury, Derby, Huntingdon, Pembroke, and Devon. The present English House of Lords has among its members no male descendant of any of the Magna Charta barons, or of any of the Peers who fought at Agincourt; while the house of Wrottesley is the solitary family among the Lords which can boast a male descent from a founder of the Order of the Garter. In 1675 the list of the English peerages created up to that time occupied fourteen closely-printed columns; to-day a single column would easily include the names of all the dignities remaining out of the whole catalogue.

Take a single instance of change in an earldom. There were the Lindsays, Earls of Crawford, who lived like princes, held courts, and had their heralds all in royal state. Pages of noble birth waited on the Earl, gentlemen of quality were the officers of his householdchamberlain, chaplains, secretary, chief mareschal, and armor-bearer. Twenty great baronies supported this splendor. Thrice did the head of the house wed immediately with the royal blood. All this grandeur was in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. In the early part of the seventeenth century David, the twelfth Earl of Crawford, died in Edinburgh Castle, where he had been imprisoned by his

The Cromwell family furnish a striking instance of rapid and thorough decay. They were of consideration and high county standing in Huntingdonshire long before the time of the great Oliver. In 1540 we find Richard Cromwell knighted by the king. He left an enormous estate, and his son and heir, Sir Henry Cromwell, was called the "Golden Knight," from his opulence and liberality. He lived in princely state, and once, at least, entertained Queen Elizabeth. His heir, Sir Oliver, magnificently entertained James I. on his Majesty's journey from Scotland to London, and was made a Knight of the Bath. He joined the royal cause with heart and purse, and died in poverty. His eldest son, Colonel Henry Cromwell, lived a life of pecuniary anxiety, and the burial of his body after death had to be skillfully managed in order to prevent its seizure by creditors. His son died a few years after without issue. Returning now to the "Golden Knight," we find his second son, Robert, the owner of an estate worth a thousand pounds a year. His eldest son was the renowned Oliver. The family then dwindled away rapidly. The Protector's great-grandson was a grocer on Snow Hill; and his son, the last male heir of the family, died an attorney in London. On the female side the fall was much greater: one of Oliver's great-granddaughters, after seeing her husband die in the work-house of a little English town, died herself, a pauper, leaving two daughters, who became the wives respectively of a shoemaker and a menial servant.

Irish titles have been preserved to a much greater extent than those of the English peerage; but yet that strange country has been more fruitful of striking vicissitudes than any other. The Martins, Lords of Connemara, were for years upon years noted in Ireland for wealth and the most generous hospitality. The estate contained one hundred and ninety-two thousand acres, the prodigious extent of which may be imagined from the fact that the grandfather of the last possessor could truthfully boast that he had an approach from his gate-house to his hall of thirty miles length. Within this territory the Martins exercised almost a feudal rule, and every head was bared in submission. But a boundless hospitality and a carelessness of man

agement gradually impoverished the estate, till | Echlin. The Echlins were an Irish family of at last, in the famine year, we see the heiress of the time of James I. There was a Right Revthe domain-styled "Princess of Connemara❞— erend Bishop of Down and Connor; there were absolutely forced to yield up the splendid prop- also a Baron of the Exchequer, a member of the erty, and to retire to the Continent, where she Irish Parliament, and sundry other important vainly endeavored to support herself by literary people, till we come to Sir Frederick, the fifth work. Failing in this, she procured from friends baronet. The "Peerage and Baronetage" tell the scanty means required to take passage in a us as much as this; but to further trace the sad sailing vessel for this country, and completed history we should have to plunge into the torthe voyage hither, but died, worn out with turing labyrinth of an Irish equity suit, which trouble, just before she would have landed. is enough like "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" to have served for the Bleak House original. It was a prolific source of sport to all the lawyers. If we wished to know how it affected the fifth baronet we should have gone, in the year 1860, to Carbury, in the county of Kildare, Ireland. There we might have seen an old man of seventy years, utterly destitute, his only means of support being sixty-two cents a week from the offerings in the parish church, and sundry donations from persons in the neighborhood. He was but little more than half-witted, unable to read or write, living a harmless but dreary existence. This was Sir Frederick Echlin, the fifth baronet, and heir to the Chancery suit. He was living in 1863, with no prospect of any improvement in his condition.

Ireland furnishes us also with a remarkable illustration of decadence in the history of the O'Neills; who derived their origin from the great Niul, of Scythia, and traced their course through Milesius, the redoubtable warrior of Spain, and Heremon, first monarch of Ireland, down through Conn of "the hundred battles," and, greatest of all, perhaps, through Niall the Great, whose praise is sung by bards innumerable, and who once led in his victorious train nine princes of the royal blood as hostages from states and kingdoms conquered by his hand. For six hundred years this race occupied exclusively the throne of Ireland, the last monarch of the line ending his reign and his life in 1168. The collateral branches of the family flourish even now in various degrees, but the main stem of There is the family of the Norwiches, Sir the tree from the twelfth century dwindled and Bernard tells us, after a pause. For a long died. From monarchs the O'Neills became time they were lords of the manor of Brampton, princes, next chiefs, next nobles of an English in Northamptonshire, and for generations they creation, next English squires, and finally no- formed high and distinguished alliances. Early thing. In 1798 Sir Francis O'Neill, sixth bar-in 1700 we find the family grown greater still onet under the English patent, lived in the village of Slane, Ireland, renting a cabin of four apartments, keeping a huxter's shop, while his son drove a cart for hire. The old man died in 1799, and of his surviving sons one kept a small dyer's shop, one was a working baker, another a mill-wright, while the youngest-the cousin of three peers and a duke, and the lineal descendant of a hundred kings-was within three years living on a crown pension of fifty-four cents a day, and occupying a room in the shop of his eldest son, a coffin-maker.

by reason of honors added and estates gained, and Sir William Norwich came into a grand property. He never married, but gave himself up to selfish pleasures, addicting himself to the gaming-table and the cup, till in a few years he lost his last estates at play with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. The title was afterward borne by others; but no one had sufficient means to support it. The widow of one of the baronets earned a livelihood by washing, and died in 1860. Her husband, the baronet, was, for years before his death, a wood-sawyer, and his father died in the parish work-house. The present heir of the family is said to be now in this country.

The Barony of Dudley, created more than five centuries ago, in England, has had among its co-heirs striking instances of Fortune's inequality. Were the history of that famous title In the history of the house of Rothes we have written in two chapters, the first would tell of a bit of romance, which lightens up our gloomy chivalry, warlike achievement, and magnificent record somewhat, though Sir Bernard takes hospitality in the old castle from which the bar- snuff regretfully and shakes his head very seriony took its name; the second would take us to ously as he gives us the details. The blood the toll-bar of an English turnpike, twenty years of the aristocracy was tampered with, and that ago, where the gate-keeper who received our must never be counted a light offense. But the toll was a descendant and co-heir of the lords of story: Leslie is an old Scottish house, of high Dudley, whose castle towered in the distance; renown, and in 1630 the grandeur of the family the chapter would further state that the remains culminated in the sixth Earl of Rothes, who of this toll-gatherer, who died on Christmas-day, lived in great splendor, and, years after, had a in 1846, were carried through the great gates of funeral almost more gorgeous than those of roythe castle, and buried by the side of his illustri-alty now. Passing by many of his descendants, ous kindred. A small farmer, a custom-house and mentioning him only to show from what a clerk, and a butcher were at the same time co-pinnacle of ancestral pride she stooped, we come heirs of the same barony. to Lady Henrietta Anne Leslie, who, says Sir

We are called on to pity the sorrows of a poor Bernard, with the most entertaining gravity, old man by the sad history of one Sir Frederick | "was the unfortunate occasion of bringing the

illustrious family of Rothes within the category | cient stem of Rothes may be invigorated by of fallen greatness." It appears that "this union with a Douglas, a Howard, a Sutherland, young lady"-still quoting the amusing Sir Ber- or a Hamilton." The American reader will be nard "the descendant of the noble blood of all pained to learn that the "young lady,” with a the Leslies, the heir and representative of the perversity which seems to belong to human nagreat Duke of Rothes, who lived like a prince ture even under a coronet, has made an alliand was buried like a king, condescended to ance according to her own preferences rather stoop to a young gardener." It is furthermore than in consonance with this advice; and neiadded that she made, as is reported-for Sir ther the Douglas, the Howard, the Sutherland, Bernard personally can know nothing about or the Hamilton has had the honor of invigorasuch matters-a most excellent, industrious, and ting the "ancient stem of Rothes." frugal wife during many years. Sir Bernard speaks of them as "long years;" but the young wife appeared to have found them all too short to contain her own happiness. It seems that the young lady, descendant of the noble blood, etc., while walking in the garden one day, met a youthful workman, and conceived an attachment for him. The love was mutual, and all agree in saying that it was strictly correct in virtue. No one will be surprised to learn that an opportunity was shortly found for a private marriage.

And now the mention of marriages suggests another of Sir Bernard's stories concerning the Earl of Breadalbane. In 1758, when the third earl held the honorable title and the immense estates thereto appertaining, he had no children, and they would naturally go to other branches: of these the nearest were an old bachelor near Edinburgh, and the son of a Highland laird, who was accustomed to call his boy Breadalbane, in anticipation of the day when he should rightfully assume that title. One day the old earl hearing again by accident what he had often heard before, that such was the habit of the father, waxed unusually wroth, and retired to bed muttering of vengeance. The next day, early, he sent an express messenger to bring the old bachelor from Edinburgh. When the brisk little gentleman had arrived the earl directed him to marry, promising to furnish him with the means of living. Old Carwhin hesitated, not from any unwillingness to oblige his lordship, but from inability to think of any one to whom to propose with any prospect of a favorable reply. The earl met this difficulty by telling him to go to a town where the court was about to meet, get

"This most unfortunate step"-we are again reporting Sir Bernard-" was one without remedy." If the match had been made a few years earlier the old Countess grandmother could have resorted to some "dodge," if we may use such a word in connection with the nobility, and thus could have banished the offending girl forever "unto that obscurity which she had taken for her portion." But such a step could not be taken at the epoch of this sad event, and so, do what they would, the gardener's wife remained the undoubted heir of the titles and property of her race. In the mean time, however, she strictly conformed to her husband's circum-introduced to the daughter of one of the judges, stances; and from her marriage in 1806 to the date of her father's death in 1817 she was a most happy and respectable woman, living in contented humility, supported by her husband's earnings. In 1817 she became Countess of Rothes, but lived only two years, being followed to the grave in ten years by what Sir Bernard persists in calling "her low-born husband." Within two or three years the title has again fallen into the hands of a young lady, and Sir Bernard, in his capacity of the Peerage Protector, took occasion at that time to give her some advice which, though given and taken in solemn earnest in England, sounds to us like a pleasant but perhaps not too well-timed jest. He wrote thus: "Let me conclude with an expression of most friendly and very sincere anxiety that this young lady may avoid the rock on which her grandmother made shipwreck. She has in a great measure the fate of a splendid title in her hands. Her earldom is not only one of the most ancient in the Peerage, but boasts of many most illustrious alliances, and an uncommon share of historical importance; and her fine domain and Castle of Leslie are identified with many remarkable and striking events of feudal times. Let her carry these honors and possessions into some one of the noblest houses of Great Britain-so that the an

and offer himself to her. The obedient Carwhin set out on his errand, procured the introduction, proposed, and was rejected! Much disconcerted in his plans, he then asked advice of a near friend. His friend said, "If all you want to do is to pleasure Breadalbane, try Betty Stonefield; I'se warrant she'll no refuse you." Carwhin took the advice, went through the same form, and was accepted, the young woman having good blood, but no charms of person or tenderness of age. A son was born of this curious marriage, and the old earl chuckled with delight at having upset the plans of the Highland laird for his son. Just now, however, Carwhin's great-grandson has died childless, and the greatgrandson of the disappointed youth has become Earl of Breadalbane. One day in November, 1862, saw that great-grandson residing in London on an income of a few hundreds, and the next found him in possession of a famous earldom and of forty thousand pounds a year.

It is not often that a dormant earldom goes a begging for a claimant at least; but that was the case for some time with the earldom of Huntingdon. That lay dormant from the death of the tenth earl in 1789 to the year 1817. A professional man of London conceived the notion that a client of his, one Captain Hastings of the Royal Navy, had a well-founded claim to