Produced by Alex Gam, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) _The_ Ghosts _of their_ Ancestors [Illustration: "_Those ancestry books are a standard joke with us_"] _The_ Ghosts _of their_ Ancestors _by Weymer Jay Mills_ _Author of_ "Caroline _of_ Courtlandt Street" _Pictures by_ John Rae [Illustration] New York Fox Duffield & Co. 1906 Copyright, 1906, by Fox Duffield & Company Published, March, 1906 The Trow Press, N. Y. [Illustration: To American Ladies & Gentlemen of prodigious Quality] To _Minerva_ and _Virginia_ Pictures "_Those ancestry books are a standard joke with us_" Frontispiece Facing page "_How lovely she is, Juma!_" 18 "_My Julie saw them kissing less than an hour ago on the marine parade_" 80 "_The lady of the banished portrait was moving through the doorway_" 110 Chapter _One_ [Illustration] There was a clanging, brassy melody upon the air. For three-score years since York of the Scarlet Coats died, and the tune "God Save the King" floated for the last time out of tavern door and mansion window, the bells of old St. Paul's had begun their ringing like this: "Loud and full voiced at eight o'clock sends good cheer abroad," said the tottering sexton. "Softer and softer, as folks turn into bed, and faint and sweet at midnight, when our dear Lord rises with the dawn." Cheery bells full of hope--gentle chimes, as if the holy mother were dreaming of her babe. Joyous, jingling, jangling bells! Through the town their tones drifted, over the thousands of slate-colored roofs, now insistent on the Broadway, now lessening a little in some long winding alley, and then finally dying away on the bare Lispenard Meadows.