She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and inches—­I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral stature, she must be full eight feet high.  When rebuking me, she can pronounce a single word, my name, “Augustus!” in a tone that renders further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of certain newcomers in our society, “I don’t know them.”  She can make her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to “take umbrage,” which is something that I never knew any one else to take outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had—­ “well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged”—­I give you her own words.  Unless you have moved in our best American society (and by this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to every-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to nothing and back to everything)—­unless you have known this haughty and improving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola.  Of course, with Uncle Andrew’s money, she does not live in a boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place her before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.

“Upon your mother’s side of the family,” she said, “of course.”

“Me!” I did not have to feign amazement.

My Aunt was silent.  “Me descended from a king?”

My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness.  “There seems to be the possibility of it.”

“Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?”

“I have said so, Augustus.  Why make me repeat it?”

It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in me.

“And from what sovereign may I hope that I—?”

“If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh—­”

“Aunt, I am so much relieved!  For I think that I might have hesitated to trace it back had you said—­well—­Charles the Second, for example, or Elizabeth.”

At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt’s eye; but I did not, and I continued imprudently:—­