"The woman looks like a Jezebel," Jonathan had sputtered. "Och! that leering smile." He tried to blot from his mind the stray leaves he knew of her story, and the disturbing thought that she was of his blood. "She shall not remain with the likenesses of my ancestors!" he had told his sisters, who were over from Goby House. When this descendant of the Knickerbockers spoke of his progenitors he always held his head a trifle more erect, and puffed out his pompous figure, though, strange to relate, like many another worthy man of a later day having the same foible, he knew very little about them. Of course he could have told you that the lady over the east bookcase, wearing a blue tucker and holding a spray of milk-weed in her hand, was his Aunt Jane; and that his father was a noted New York judge, the pride of three circuits. Or if his digression were extended, there was his trump card, one of the first American Knickerbockers, labelled "The Friend of Lord Cornbury!" These were the firmest rocks in his family history, to which he could climb in safety, thence to look down with scorn on those unfortunates beneath his social eminence. He was a Knickerbocker, of Knickerbocker Mansion, Vesey Street, and a member of one of the oldest families in York and America. Patricia, smiling little Patricia, rummaging one day among the dust-bins under the eaves, had found the banished portrait. Juma, the gray-wooled negro, a comparatively new member of the Knickerbocker household, who had appointed himself her body-servant ever since his arrival at the mansion, was with her. [Illustration] A faithful slave to old Miss Johnstone of Crown Street, Juma had been forced by his mistress's death into new service. He was a picture of ebonized urbanity, a good specimen of the vanished race of Gotham blacks, gentler in manners and clearer in speech than their Southern cousins. In his youth he had been sent to one Jean Toussaint of Elizabethtown to learn the art of hair-dressing. He could impart much knowledge of wigs to a wigless age, and talked in a grandiloquent fashion of Spencers, Albemarles, and Lavants. Many a beau peruke and macaroni toupee his lithe fingers curled and sprinkled with sweet flower-water. The voices of the fine people who were his visitors made constant music in his memory, and his tongue was ever ready with anecdotes of wizened beauties and uncrowned cavaliers. Juma was faithful to the period of his greatest splendor. Deep in his heart he despised the home to which freedom and poverty had led him after the demise of his protectress. "Gold braid on company coat and silk stockings done ravel out in dese days. Knickerbockers talk quality, but dey ain't got quality mannahs--Missy Patsy is de only one of dem with tone."