MY UNCLE FLORIMOND By Sidney Luska (Henry Harland) Author of The Yoke of the Thorah and Others D. Lothrop Company Boston: Franklin and Hawley Streets 1888 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0006] [Illustration: 0007] TO MY GRANDMOTHER A. L. H. IN REMEMBRANCE OF OLD NORWICH DAYS CHAPTER I.--THE NEPHEW OF A MARQUIS. Both of my parents died while I was still a baby; and I passed my childhood at the home of my father's mother in Norwich Town--which lies upon the left bank of the river Yantic, some three miles to the north of Norwich City, in Eastern Connecticut. My father's mother, my dear old grandmother, was a French lady by birth; and her maiden name had been quite an imposing one--Aurore Aline Raymonde Marie Antoinette de la Bourbonnaye. But in 1820, when she was nineteen years old, my grandfather had persuaded her to change it for plain and simple Mrs. Brace; from which it would seem that my grandfather must have been a remarkably persuasive man. At that time she lived in Paris with her father and mother, who were very lofty, aristocratic people--the Marquis and Marquise de la Bourbonnaye. But after her marriage she followed her husband across the ocean to his home in Connecticut, where in 1835 he died, and where she had remained ever since. She had had two children: my father, Edward, whom the rebels shot at the Battle of Bull Run in July, 1861, and my father's elder brother, my Uncle Peter, who had never married, and who was the man of our house in Norwich.