The name is pronounced _Berrick_. It is a rule in England to spell proper names one way and pronounce them another: thus Edinburgh is Edinboro, Derby is Darby, Brougham is Broom, Cholmondeley is Chumly and so on. This rule is sometimes inconvenient. An American tourist wished to visit the home of Charlotte Brontë. He asked the way to Haworth. _Ha-worth!_ Nobody had ever heard of such a place. No such place in that part of England. At last somebody guessed that this stray foreigner wanted to go to Hawth. Haworth is Hawth. But that act of Parliament did not decree that folks should say Berrick and not Berwick; and even if it had, it would not be of force in this country; so the reader may pronounce it just as he pleases. From that town was derived the ducal title of my subject. In November, 1873, I sailed for England. Among my shipmates was Lord Alfred Churchill an uncle of the present duke of Marlborough, and a descendent of John Churchill duke of Marlborough the famous general of Queen Anne. Walking the deck one day with Lord Alfred, I asked him about his family--not about his wife and children--that would not have been good manners; but about the historic line from which he sprang. I asked how it was that he was a Churchill, when he was descended not from a son but from a daughter of the great duke. He explained that an act of parliament had authorised Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland, son-in-law of the duke, not only to take the title of duke of Marlborough, but to change his name from Spencer to Churchill. There can be no better evidence of the overshadowing glory of the great captain than that the house of Sunderland should so nearly suppress the old, aristocratic name of Spencer, in favor of the new, the parvenu Churchill. The Spencers came in with the Conqueror, and we meet them often in history. We well remember the two Spencers, father and son, who were executed in the reign of Edward II. on a charge of high-treason; and that bizarre historian A’Becket says that the sad tale of those Spencers led afterwards to the introduction of spencers without any tail at all. I asked his lordship what had become of the Berwick branch of the Churchills. He answered drily that he did not know--so drily in fact that I inferred he had forgotten there had ever been such a branch. In order to introduce that branch I must ask you to go back with me to the middle of the seventeenth century. Charles Stuart, Charles II. sits on the throne of England, or rather perambulates about it, for he is a great walker: he and his dogs are always in motion; and his favorite breed of those animals is still known as the King Charles spaniel. Charles was a witty and a disreputable monarch: one current view of him is that he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.