That is quite sufficient, said the colonel: few post-diluvian families can produce a better title. CHAPTER VII. _The Narrative is interrupted by the Arrival of a Letter from old Morgan of Glen Morgan._ It is not always the greatest misfortune, that can befal the listener to a long story, if the teller shall chance to be called off in the middle of it. This was just now the case with Robert De Lancaster, who had advanced in his narrative but a very few years on this side of the Trojan war, when the arrival of the servant, whom he had dispatched with his letter of congratulation to old Morgan of Glen-Morgan, cut him short in his progress, and it probably required as much philosophy on his part to command his patience, as it did on Wilson’s to conceal his pleasure. However this might be, De Lancaster upon the receipt of Morgan’s answer to his letter, came to an immediate pause in his story, and leaving about three thousand years of his pedigree as yet unaccounted for, read as follows-- “Dear Sir, “Your servant duly delivered your kind letter, informing me, that my daughter Mrs. Philip De Lancaster was safely delivered of a son; an event, which I hope will afford much consolation to you, and be the happy means of delivering down to future generations a name, which from time immemorial has been highly respectable in these parts. “To my name as one of the sponsors at the christening you have an undoubted right, and I am flattered that you enforce it; but of my personal attendance upon that solemnity there is I fear but little chance; for I am a victim to the gout, and though the snow, which now lies on the hills, may disappear before the month is out, I cannot expect my pains will be in the like melting mood: but He, who is the disposer of all things, will dispose even of such a wretched insignificant as I am. “Alas! my good brother-in-law, I am not like you a healthy, gay and social man; I am gloomy, sullen and uncomfortable; hypochondriac by nature, and splenetic by vexation and disease: I will not say that I repent that ever I was a father; that would be wrong; but I do say, that, being a father, I repent of my unfitness, and am conscious of my errors.