Let us trace it back to its source, and having made our readers acquainted with the origin of the "Weird of the Wentworths," we shall next narrate the short lives and untimely deaths of one generation--the brightest link in a long chain of misery; and if their lives were short, they were full of romance and vigour, like the torrent, abrupt and headlong in its course, and still reaching the same bourne that the slow and tardy river only takes a longer period to arrive at. Retrace, then, with us the scroll of English history till we come to the sad page of the Commonwealth. It is not our intention to discuss whether the Protector was right or wrong, but merely to narrate facts, as they were. Cromwell was about this time tolerably secure on his usurped throne--the heir to the British crown a wandering exile in his native land. Those were troublous times; days when a man's foes were often those of his household; when the nearest and dearest ties were severed; and perhaps under the same roof, dwelt the bigot republican, and the proud royalist burning to avenge his king's wrongs; each looked on his neighbour with uncertainty, each feared the other as a traitor in the camp. Cromwell himself, raised to the utmost pitch of his ambition, was on an unenviable height--his tiara was a crown of thorns--over his head hung the sword of Damocles; and, having himself been a rebel to his monarch, he now feared an assassin in every one who approached his presence, and it is said almost entirely shut himself out of society, wearing chain armour beneath his raiment. Still he had faithful supporters, staunch friends, and loyal soldiers; and of all his admirers no more burning republican existed than Sir Ralph de Vere, a general in the Protector's army, one he had himself knighted on the field of Worcester. Sir Ralph, from being an intolerant Catholic, had now become an intolerant Protestant, and-- "with all the zeal That young and fiery converts feel," warred against those whose cause he had once warmly espoused, and sought the destruction of the creed of which he had once been the champion. Very different from Sir Ralph was his first cousin Augusta de Vere, then, in her own right, Countess of Wentworth, and Abbess of St. Clements, a monastic pile on the Wye.