Proud by nature, by blood, and by education--though with a clear and honorable pride--he had been rendered a thousand times prouder and more haughty by the very circumstances which seemed to threaten a downfall to the fortunes of his house--his house, which had survived such desperate reverses; which had come out of every trial, like pure gold, the better and the brighter from the furnace--his house, which neither the ruin of friendly monarchs, nor the persecutions of hostile monarchs, nor the neglect of ungrateful monarchs, had been able to shake, any more than the autumnal blasts, or the frosts of winter, had availed to uproot the oak trees of his park, coeval with his name. In the midst of health and wealth, honor and good esteem, with an affectionate family, and a devoted household around him, Allan Fitz-Henry fancied himself a most unhappy man--perhaps the most unhappy of mankind. Alas! was it to punish such vain, such sinful, such senseless, and inordinate repinings? Who shall presume to scrutinize the judgments, or pry into the secrets of the Inscrutable? This much alone is certain, that ere he was gathered to his fathers, Allan Fitz-Henry might, and that not unjustly, have termed himself that, which now, in the very wantonness of pampered and insatiate success he swore that he was daily--the most unhappy of the sons of men. For to calamities so dreadful as might have disturbed the reason of the strongest minded, remorse was added, so just, so terrible, so overwhelming, that men actually marveled how he lived on and was not insane. But I must not anticipate. It was a short time after the failure of the Duke of Monmouth's weak and ungrateful attempt at revolution, a short time after the conclusion of the merciless and bloody butcheries of that disgrace to the English ermine, the ferocious Jefferies, that the incidents occurred, which I learned first on the evening subsequent to my discovery in the fatal summer-house. At this time Allan Fitz-Henry--it was a singular proof, by the way, of the hereditary pride of this old Norman race, that having numbered among them so many friends and counsellors of monarchs, no one of their number had been found willing to accept titular honors, holding it a higher thing to be the premier gentleman than the junior peer of England--At this time, I say, Allan Fitz-Henry was a man of some forty-five or fifty years, well built and handsome, of courtly air and dignified presence; nor must it be imagined that in his fancied grievances he forgot to support the character of his family, or that he carried his griefs abroad with him into the world.