"Oh, they were a great Hampshire family," said he. "For five hundred years they lived on their estates in Hampshire. The first of the name was Sir William Dorkminster, who came over with the Conqueror, and most likely was given those estates for his services. Then we go on until we come to the Duke of Dorkminster, who built a castle, and whose brother Henry was made bishop and founded an abbey, which I am sorry to say doesn't now exist, being totally destroyed by Oliver Cromwell." You cannot imagine how my blood leaped and surged within me as I listened to those words. William the Conqueror! An ancestral abbey! A duke! "Is the family castle still standing?" said I. "It fell into ruins," said he, "during the reign of Charles I., and even its site is now uncertain, the park having been devoted to agricultural purposes. The fourth Duke of Dorkminster was to have commanded one of the ships which destroyed the Spanish Armada, but was prevented by a mortal fever which cut him off in his prime; he died without issue, and the estates passed to the Culverhams of Wilts." "Did that cut off the line?" said I, very quick. "Oh, no," said the family-tree man, "the line went on. One of the duke's younger sisters must have married a man on condition that he took the old family name, which is often done, and her descendants must have emigrated somewhere, for the name no longer appears in Hampshire; but probably not to America, for that was rather early for English emigration." "Do you suppose," said I, "that they went to Scotland?" "Very likely," said he, after thinking a minute; "that would be probable enough. Have you reason to suppose that there was a Scotch branch in your family?" "Yes," said I, for it would have been positively wrong in me to say that the feelings that I had for the Scotch hadn't any meaning at all. "Now then," said Mr. Brandish, "there you are, madam. There is a line all the way down from the Conqueror to the end of the sixteenth century, scarcely one man's lifetime before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock." I now began to calculate in my mind. I was thirty years old; my mother, most likely, was about as old when I was born; that made sixty years. Then my grandfather might have been forty when my mother was born, and there was a century. As for my great-grandfather and his parents, I didn't know anything about them. Of course, there must have been such persons, but I didn't know where they came from or where they went to. "I can go back a century," said I, "but that doesn't begin to meet the end of the line you have marked out. There's a gap of about two hundred years."