On Lord Bracton's left there is another portrait, the picture of a woman no longer young, her almost grey hair massed above her head, but her eyes clear and bright as when first they gazed on Bevill Bracton in Louvain, while over all her features there is a look of content. By her side stands a youth still in his teens, one so like this woman that none can doubt he is her son. Facing the entrance hangs a larger picture than all-- that of a handsome man in scarlet and covered with orders and decorations; one whose tranquil features and soft lineaments bespeak calm self-reliance; confidence. On a medallion beneath this are the words: "John, first Duke of Marlborough and Marquess of Blandford, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Prince of Mindelheim in Suabia." Around the house are copses and thickets, and outside them the woods, in all of which have played five or six generations of children, some of them Bractons, some of them named De Violaine. Also, in the dead and gone days that Time has powdered for ever with its dust, these children have grown up and intermarried in the old church near by, the living of which has been held perpetually for over a hundred and fifty years by De Violaines, all of whom are descended from a French refugee officer who settled here. It must be, therefore--since that refugee would never have taken any but one woman for his wife--that, at last, Radegonde de Valorme was enabled to forget the sufferings of him who died at the galleys for his religion's sake, to reconcile herself to seeing Sylvia wedded to the Englishman who came once into her life and troubled her thoughts; that she was contented to eventually make happy the gallant soldier who had loved her so long. There is one little copse to which those children of different generations have always loved to resort, and, after playing, to sit there and talk of its associations with old days--a little copse of nut-trees and red may, in which they find the earliest white violets and where, they say, the robins always build their nests and the nightingales love to sit and sing on summer nights. Yet, as they tell their little stories to each other and weave not only fancies of the past, but, it may be, of the future as well, their eyes rest upon a great stone slab that lies along the ground embedded in grass and overgrown with moss--moss that, however, many tiny hands have often scraped and brushed away so that they might once more read the two words cut into that stone by some old graver of bygone days--the words, "La Rose." FOOTNOTES [Footnote 1: The pistole at this period was worth £3 6s. 6d.] [Footnote 2: Brantôme, who lived shortly after Charles V.'s time, says all the other monarchs called him this because he never kept a treaty, and cheated everybody.] [Footnote 3: Now the 1st (Royal) Dragoons.]