Such, briefly sketched, is my native Saxonholme.  Born beneath the shade of its towering trees and overhanging eaves, brought up to reverence its antiquities, and educated in the love of its natural beauties, what wonder that I cling to it with every fibre of my heart, and even when affecting to smile at my own fond prejudice, continue to believe it the loveliest peacefulest nook in rural England?

My father’s name was John Arbuthnot.  Sprung from the Arbuthnots of Montrose, we claim to derive from a common ancestor with the celebrated author of “Martinus Scriblerus.”  Indeed, the first of our name who settled at Saxonholme was one James Arbuthnot, son to a certain nonjuring parson Arbuthnot, who lived and died abroad, and was own brother to that famous wit, physician and courtier whose genius, my father was wont to say, conferred a higher distinction upon our branch of the family than did those Royal Letters-Patent whereby the elder stock was ennobled by His most Gracious Majesty King George the Fourth, on the occasion of his visit to Edinburgh in 1823.  From this James Arbuthnot (who, being born and bred at St. Omer, and married, moreover, to a French wife, was himself half a Frenchman) we Saxonholme Arbuthnots were the direct descendants.

Our French ancestress, according to the family tradition, was of no very exalted origin, being in fact the only daughter and heiress of one Monsieur Tartine, Perruquier in chief at the Court of Versailles.  But what this lady wanted in birth, she made up in fortune, and the modest estate which her husband purchased with her dowry came down to us unimpaired through five generations.  In the substantial and somewhat foreign-looking red-brick house which he built (also, doubtless, with Madame’s Louis d’ors) we, his successors, had lived and died ever since.  His portrait, together with the portraits of his wife, son, and grandson, hung on the dining-room walls; and of the quaint old spindle-legged chairs and tables that had adorned our best rooms from time immemorial, some were supposed to date as far back as the first founding and furnishing of the house.

It is almost needless to say that the son of the non-juror and his immediate posterity were staunch Jacobites, one and all.  I am not aware that they ever risked or suffered anything for the cause; but they were not therefore the less vehement.  Many were the signs and tokens of that dead-and-gone political faith which these loyal Arbuthnots left behind them.  In the bed-rooms there hung prints of King James the Second at the Battle of the Boyne; of the Royal Martyr with his plumed hat, lace collar, and melancholy fatal face; of the Old and Young Pretenders; of the Princess Louisa Teresia, and of the Cardinal York.  In the library were to be found all kinds of books relating to the career of that unhappy family:  “Ye Tragicall History of ye Stuarts, 1697;” “Memoirs of King James II., writ by his own hand;” “La Stuartide,” an unfinished epic in the French