Council of Five Hundred from their Hall of Session, and brought the Directorial government to a close. Soon after he was married to Caroline. According to Bourrienne, Napoleon made some objection, on the ground of Murat's being an innkeeper's son; but he was influenced by Josephine to give his consent, which he did the more readily, as Josephine's interest in promoting this marriage seemed to give the lie to the gossip which represented him as one of the gallants of whom she was too fond. Napoleon, though already First Consul, could only afford his sister a dowry of thirty thousand francs, with one of Josephine's necklaces for a wedding present. The day after he proclaimed himself Emperor, he made Murat a marshal, as he did seventeen others of his principal generals.

In Jan., 1802, Louis Bonaparte married Hortense Beauharnais, a match also brought about by Josephine, and that, too, in spite of the indifference of Louis and the repugnance of Hortense—who was in love with Duroc, afterwards the imperial chamberlain. Josephine hoped thus to strengthen herself against the hostility evinced to her by other members of the Bonaparte family; but this marriage proved an unhappy

one, and after having three children, the parties separated. The eldest son died in infancy. The second grew to manhood, and married Joseph's eldest daughter, but died soon after, as did also his wife. Hortense's third son is the present emperor of France.

Jerome, the youngest brother, whose character was formed after the fortune of the family had been made, was as sad, dissipated, extravagant a dog, as if he had been born an hereditary prince. His brother, whose letters evince a partiality for him, and who, perhaps, liked him none the less for these princely peccadilloes, put him into the navy, and during a visit to the United States in that capacity, in December, 1803, while yet only nineteen, he married Miss Patterson, of Baltimore. Napoleon was very much offended with this marriage, and refused to recognize it; and neither Lucien nor Jerome, on account of their unsatisfactory marriages, were mentioned in the decree which settled the order of succession to the empire.

But here, having raised Napoleon to the imperial throne, and married off all his brothers and sisters, we shall stop to take breath, deferring to another article the account of Napoleon's family relations after he became emperor.

I

HAD been drawing up a diagram of my family-tree. Not such a tree as we usually see displayed, its single stem rooted in some ancient individual, who, in Old England, is probably some comrade of Norman William, or, in New England, some fellow-religionist of Elder Brewster and Miles Standish; a tree which, branching out into ramification after ramification, becomes a perfect maze of boughs and twigs, on the terminal bud of one of which is the proper place of the proud possessor of this family-chart.

Such a diagram may illustrate the collateral relationship of one's family, but not at all his ancestry. For it shows, at any past generation, but a single ancestor, from whom, in the fourth previous remove, we can derive but one-sixteenth of our descent, while, in the fifth and sixth removes, our interest in him is reduced to one-thirty-second or one-sixtyfourth part. In those generations, respectively, we had sixteen, thirty-two, and sixty-four ancestors and ancestresses, from each of whom we may be presumed to have derived an equal sixteenth, thirty-second, or sixty-fourth part of the traits of person or character, which make up our individuality.

And it is a poor source of satisfaction to know that one descends in a specified arbitrary line-say through eldest sons -from one personage of respectability, while every other progenitor in the same degree may have been a scamp.

If my four grandparents were of the families of Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, is there any reason why I should attach myself to the pedigree of the Smiths exclusively; because, as I can bear but one name, that happens to be the one which I inherit under certain conventional customs of soceity? Nothing can be more absurd. The only sensible practice is to reverse the family-tree; and so I did considering myself the trunk, and my progenitors the roots, at which I had been digging and exploring with much zeal and some satisfaction, by the aid of piles of old faded letters, a couple of family bibles, and a collection of epitaphs, gleaned from the red-sandstone monuments in the old burying-grounds of Connecticut and New Jersey.

It was clear enough that my four grandparents-of four families which

were obscurely active in the revolutionary war, spending their energies, their little fortunes, and some of their lives in the service-bore names of English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh derivation. The next generations were not so distinctly made out; but, among many plain and respectable people of British and Hibernian origin, I found intermingled, names unmistakably Low Dutch, from the early colonists of New Amsterdam; Germans, from immigrants from the Palatinate; and French, from the Huguenot settlers, who came to New York and New Jersey in the seventeenth century. I soon followed back these traces until I found them, as it were, freshly printed on the shores of the ocean, and hit upon clues connecting me across the water with their European localities. Further investigations detected, among my ancestors, a line of English baronets and squires, running back to the time of Edward I.; Scotch and Irish forefathers, whose connections were lost among the forgotten clans of the mountains and the morasses; Swainsons, who were evidently sons of some Sweyn, sea-pirate, from Scandinavia; Alstons, probably descended from a Saxon Athelstan; a Fitzroy, which implied some bend-sinister sort of claim to good blood in an irregular way—but so far back that the romance of the story had survived its scandal; and a dozen other varying patronymics, which, from their etymology, or some known circumstance relating to them, authorized me to believe that in the plaited and intertwisted skein of my ancestry could I trace threads drawn from almost every nation-from Ireland to Bohemia, and from Norway to the shores of the Medi

terranean.

Meditating on the subject, I fell into a mathematical calculation of the number of forefathers and foremothers I had had during a long period, say of five hundred years; and by a simple process, satisfied myself that in the fifteenth previous generation, say A.D. 1346, about the time the Black Prince was campaigning in Picardy, I must have had thirtytwo thousand then living progenitors. Of these, most were probably English, though some of them must have been Frenchmen, fighting zealously against my British ancestors; while others were Dutchmen, or farmers on the fertile

fields of Flanders; wild Irish Celts, watching every opportunity to avenge themselves with fire and sword on their English oppressors; or Celts of the Scottish hills, equally hostile to the Saxon, cherishing proud memories of Bruce and Wallace, and, though wroth with many a defeat, yet elated with the fresh glory of Bannockburn.

I began to wonder what share of influence each of these individuals had had on my own person and character; whether, in case any of the happy unions which had contributed to my ancestry had been prevented, I should have been the person I now am, or somebody else, or whether I should not have been at all. Certainly, if my immediate parents had died in childhood, I could not have been ; or, even if one of them had survived, and been differently mated, I should not have been me, but some other and different person would have come of it. And of course the same argument is equally sound as applying to all previous alliances. I puzzled over this, as some theologians I have heard of have worried over the origin and necessary sequence of things, to reconcile theory with facts, and should, doubtless, have arrived at as clear and useful conclusions as they, but that I gradually dozed and drowsed, until, still thinking of my ancestors, and wishing that I could only go back and see them, I fell, like many other investigators before me, soundly asleep.

And, like many previous investigators, I found my dreams clearer than my waking thoughts, and had all which I had hopelessly desired before.

I walked along the highway, still southeastward, until, on passing the crown of a gentle hill, I looked back, and the spires of Bristol were almost imperceptible in the distance.

A middle-sized, bluff-looking man, in the prime of life, dressed in garments which, by their neat simplicity and substantial texture, indicated for their wearer the pursuits and position of a squire of moderate means, or wealthy farmer, mounted on a stout bay horse, came rapidly up the ascent which I had just surmounted. There was a frankness in his fresh countenance which harmonized with the general style of his equipment, and, despite his plain attire, gave him a little the air of a cavalier; and the hearty greeting with which he saluted me, strengthened the agreeable impression I was forming of him. After

a few words of commonplace remark, concerning the weather, which I found as usual a topic in 1643 as two hundred years later, and especially interesting to my friend, as a considerable proprietor, whose crops were yet out, I inquired if he knew any family of the name of Lawton, in the neighboring part of Wiltshire. 66 Certainly," said he; "there are half a dozen households of us within two or three parishes, and I believe I am myself the representative of the eldest branch, though the Yorkshire baronet claims that precedency for himself. But who are you, with so peculiar a speech, and such a strange cut of dress, inquiring so familiarly after a name hardly known beyond a single corner of a single county ?"

"I am Hugh Lawton," said I; "I have come three thousand miles and two hundred years to find my ancestors. I left Oneida county, in New York, by a means of travel, the rapidity and ease of which you cannot conceive; but I have had a hard journey, nevertheless. Before I arrived half way to tide-water, the car somehow became a coach on a wretched road, and fifty of the last miles I had to do on horseback and on foot through bridle-paths in the forest, till I reached the river and the sloop which brought me to the port. Hence I have come in a wretched little bark, dignified with the name of a Bristol trader, while, since leaving that city, I have been glad to use my own private conveyances, instead of the lumbering wagon in which I was offered a place. But, considering the peculiar nature of my journey, perhaps, I could not have expected better speed. And so you are one of the Lawtons? Are you my sixth ancestor, Robert, or my seventh ancestor, Jervase? and will you take me to your residence, and introduce me to the rest of my relations ?"

Aye," replied he, "the matter is clear enough now. I am Jervase Lawton. Robert, who is, or was, or is to be your sixth progenitor, is a white-headed little fellow, whom you shall see to-night. You are lucky in meeting with me, for more reasons than one; the roads are unsafe, and I am sorry to say all the more so, since his majesty's troops have held the city. You are unarmed, and such weapons as this are necessary companions now to honest men❞—and he drew from his holster a long bellmuzzled pistol, with a wheel lock-such

an ancient engine as I had seen in museums of old arms-which he said his ancestor and mine had taken as prizes of war at the capture of one of the Armada.

66

Nay," said I, "I am better armed than you, if not so heavily; here is what we shoot each other with in America, and 1850-and I drew from a pocket a little revolver, and handed it to him. He took it with much curiosity; but as it touched his hand, the tiny steel weapon swelled into a great brass-barreled dragoon's pistol, of the tower pattern of 1640. He gave it back into my hand, and its original form. "Indeed," said he, "you are in advance of us; but I see there is no use in our trying to handle your inventions. Come, friend and posterity, my home is but a few miles further in yonder valley. My wife, who is very curious about America, where her grandfather went with Raleigh, will be delighted to see you, and to welcome you to the best that a Wiltshire yeoman's home can offer."

It was near sunset when we reached his substantial residence. A peacock was strutting in the yard, cocks were crowing and fighting on the other side of the hedge, pigeons cooing on the roof; and I thought of the story of Pecopin, and how, after his absence for an hundred years on the devil's hunt, his return was greeted by such familiar sounds. There was really little about the place which differed very much from my own transatlantic home in the nineteenth century, nor from the rural, sequestered parts of England, which I had visited in 1840.

I was received, without any appearance of surprise, by my grandmother in the seventh remove-a pretty woman of thirty, trimly dressed, and followed by four children, among whom I found my lineal ancestor in a stout little fellow of six years, who sat on my knee, and wondered at my thin Geneva watch, and played curiously with a nugget of Californian quartz and gold, which served as a key.

As we sat after our supper on the stone bench at the door, the little river running brightly under its overhanging elms, as did the Oriskany in Oneida, my fair ancestress asked of the colonies in Virginia, where she had cousins, and whither other friends were half inclined to go in these troublesome times. I began to tell her of the old deserted

manors and decayed mansions; of later prosperous towns, busy harbors, and of our federal city, with its marble piles, where meet the representatives from thirty states, and from a population of twenty millions. But her wondering eyes, and some questions about the children of that pretty Mrs. Pocahontas Rolfe, whom her mother once saw in the streets of Bristol, recalled me to the period in which we were, and I acknowledged that her advices from the James River were far more interesting than mine. There was some confusion in our minds, to be sure; yet it was pleasant to hear her stories of her father's adventures, exploring the new country along the Potomac, and to read her cousin's letters, telling of their growing prosperity, of the promising character of the tobacco culture, of the great demand for servants from Africa, and the greater wish for fair wives from England. I thought to have made a memorandum of these things for the benefit of our historians; but, remembering that some of them were already so well informed, that they had not only traced the acts, and explained the motives of men, but had also clearly expounded the designs and modus operandi of Providence, during the early period of our nation, I thought it superfluous.

In my turn, I had long narratives to tell of things which to them were yet far in the future. How the grandson of the little fellow on my knee-a Bristol 'prentice-would overstay his employer's leave of absence, and on a sudden resolution go on board the ready ship with his little bundle; how he was to trade and prosper in the new colonies; how he should marry, and have half a dozen stout sons; how one should become a farmer on the shores where then were the Narragansetts' wigwams; another a sea-trader to the still vext Bermoothes, and the isles of the Western Indies; and others should engage in other busy pursuits, for in that country there would be work enough for all, and none could be idle, or live such quiet, placid lives as in ancestral Wiltshire; how, when the war of separation should break out, many of them would take arms with varying fortune, like that which even now was befalling friends in the civil troubles; how one should meet no worse disaster than to lose his good horse, mixed in the retreat at Monmouth, on such a hot Sunday as

never was in Britain; or to have his coattail amputated by a grape-shot on the field of Whiteplains; while others should make desperate defense of their seaside homes against the fierce inroad of the outnumbering enemy;-and the women should the next morning go instep-deep in blood, in the black and trampled redoubt overlooking the smouldering village, to recognize among the slain their relatives of every near degree. How their children would remove still westward into the woods, and how even now in their far future, the homes of my own generation were among hills and valleys fertile as those by the Severn; and such boys as my little ancestor before me; there heard the same nursery rhymes which he knew; and there amused themselves not only as he in Wiltshire, but with such skating and sliding down hills on the snow as he could hardly imagine.

My friends were deeply interested in this narrative of what was to be, as my was I in their tales of the days of James and Elizabeth. But when we came to speak of political topics, they, being inclined to the cause of the church and king, were somewhat scandalized at my account of our government.

I was obliged to admit, that whatever roguery and rascality might prevail in their court, and among high personages and their immediate connections, it was confined mainly within those narrow limits; that my own country and time, if we believe the charges of the Outs against the Ins, could furnish parallels to almost any official misconduct; while the universal liberty to hold office in New York and 1850, caused an extent of petty party leagues and combinations, which permeated every grade of society, made the appointment of every minute office in the customs, the post-office, and the judicial and executive departments, the reward of disciplined partisan service, and brought corrupting ambition down to the humblest walks of life, and into the poorest hamlet. My ancestors expressed themselves happy in their quiet and unambitious position, and quoted an old proverb, which I suspected might in later days have been recast and polished by Dr. Johnson into his wellknown couplet, asserting, that of all the ills of life, governments or rulers could cause or cure but a small proportion.

We talked, too, of superstitions, and such wild stories as prevailed in commu

nities more imaginative than those of Massachusetts. My friends were, as I could see, more than half believers in elfin legends; for, showing me in the short sheep pasture on the adjoining hill a circle of brilliant green vegetation, they asked if I did not believe that to be the trace of a fairy assemblage. I could only answer, that I had read in British writers of

Merry elves their morrice pacing,

Emerald rings on brown heath tracing,"

but knew of nothing of the kind in America. There all the lower and more familiar supernaturalities seemed to have been banished by the full glare of noonday civilization, and not even a jack-o'lantern remained in sight, lingering and flickering in the rear of his vanished associates. I had to admit that not only the fairies, bogles, and brownies had left us, but that with them we had lost some other imps of great use in a police point of view; for that the researches of some German and New England divines had even driven the devil himself out of sight and out of mind; made his name a joke and byword, and rendered the popular idea of his awful abode a mere speculative something or nothing, somewhere or nowhere, a shadow, myth, or phantasmic type, existent, semi-existent, or non-existent in the anticipation or the imagination.

A sober curate, for all the world like an Episcopal minister whom I had left in Oneida county, and 1850, had joined us not long before, and had been sitting silently with us, looking with natural suspicion at me-the strange visitor from their hereafter--but my expressions of good will, for all that was orthodox, and much that was superstitious, seemed to assure him and win his confidence. He joined heartily in the conversation, with much learning and imagination; and we pursued our theme-the popular belief, backward, century by century, through reform, Romanism, and primitive Christianity, to the day far previous to that of Augustine, when, as he stoutly maintained, St. Paul landed on the shores of Kent, and there happened, in every Druidic circle, and forest temple, those marvels and portents to which Scott alluded, when he told

"How, when the cross to Britain came,, On heathen altars died the flame."

Delighted with my friends and rela