in 1851, and Chase had pronounced the funeral oration over him. There was a full-length portrait of him scowling at a scroll of legal cap, with a big double-inkstand on the table beside him--"handy so he could shy it at you in case you disagreed," Gwynne Peters used profanely to suggest--hanging on the parlour wall just opposite the long mirror between the windows; the chairs and sofas were always shrouded in white linen covers; white net bags swathed the ornate gilt-and-glass chandeliers. It was a ghostly place, that room, with a clock mounted in a kind of Greek temple of alabaster under a glass dome on the mantel sepulchrally ticking out the irrecoverable hours, and Governor Gwynne eyeing you sternly from his elevation. He looked not too well pleased with his canvas immortality and considering what he must see, it was no wonder. He was born some time during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and therefore must have been upwards of sixty before the day when Chase sonorously reminded his hearers in the south parlour that--"The history of Samuel Gwynne's life was, in very truth, the history of his native State, so closely was he associated with her struggles, her vicissitudes, and her achievements.... If zeal, if integrity, if courage and ability in the discharge alike of public and private duties can establish a claim upon the grateful remembrance of posterity, _then_, fellow-citizens, we may well point with pride.... _This_ was the noblest Roman of them all," etc. A neat pamphlet containing the address and the Resolutions of the Bar Association was afterwards printed and distributed; it was only the other day that I came upon a copy of it, very yellow and dusty, but bearing no marks of ever having been tampered with by a reader--indeed, some of the leaves were yet uncut--among other essays and orations of a like nature blushing unseen in the darkest corner of a second-hand book-shop. From it I extracted the rhetorical gems just cited, and it is doubtful if they will ever see the light again, yet I am confident that the old gentleman deserved much that was said of him, and would have been the first to deprecate any "pointing with pride." He was an upright judge, a temperate and God-fearing man; he amassed a handsome fortune, and served his particular section of the country through two terms as Governor, rather fancying himself, I believe, in the role of statesman, and all unwittingly laying the foundations of that intolerable, absurd, and tragic Gwynne family pride; it beset all his descendants and all the countless kindred of Gwynnes like a curse. No more arrogantly self-righteous set of people ever existed; and no more hysterically clannish. The Governor's memory held them all together for forty years after his death; only recently, with the introduction of new blood, has that strange, intangible bond dissolved. Samuel died and was gathered to his fathers; and Samuel, his son reigned in his stead, and busily