Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance, before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the "ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of remorseless anger--it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a temporary pause in the directness of this narration. CHAPTER V. THE BIRTH AND BLOOD OF THE BRANDS--PRIDE THAT CAME DOWN FROM THE CRUSADES--ROBERT BRAND AS SOLDIER AND PENSION-AGENT--THE PENSIONERS OF THE REVOLUTION--HOW ELSIE RAVED, AND HOW THE FATHER'S CURSE SEEMED TO BE ANSWERED--DR. JAMES HOLTON, AND THE LOSS OF A CORPUS DELICTI.