It was one of Henry's deep-sunken maxims that "a distinguished product implied a distinguished process," and that, at all events, the genealogical process was only illustratively important. It would have been interesting to know how they, the Mesuriers, came to be what they were. In the dark night of their history a family portrait or two, or an occasional reference in history, would have been an entertaining illumination--but, such not being forthcoming, they were, documentally, so much the less indebted to their progenitors. Yet if they had only been able to claim some ancestor with a wig and a degree for the humanities, or some beautiful ancestress with a romantic reputation! One's own present is so much more interesting for developing, or even repeating, some one else's past. And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation,--the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so much; here so much had made--hardly even a lord. It was better for your circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circumstances. Henry had amused himself one day in making a list of all their "ancestors" to whom any sort of worldly or romantic distinction could attach, and it ran somewhat as follows:-- (1) A great-grandmother on the father's side, fabled to live in some sort of a farm-house château in Guernsey, who once a year, up till two years ago, when she died, had sent them a hamper of apples from Channel Island orchards. Said "château" believed by his children to descend to James Mesurier, but the latter indifferent to the matter, and relatives on the spot probably able to look after it. (2) A great-grandfather on the mother's side given to travel, a "rolling-stone," fond of books and talk, and rich in humanity. Surviving still in a high-nosed old silhouette. (3) A grand-uncle on the father's side who was one of Napoleon's guard at St. Helena! (4) A grandfather on the mother's side, who used to design and engrave little wooden blocks for patterns on calico-stuffs, and whose little box of delicate instruments, evidently made for the tracing of lines and flowers, was one of the few family heirlooms. (5) A grandmother on the father's side of whom nothing was known beyond the beautiful fact that she was Irish. (6) A grandfather on the father's side who was a sea-captain, sailing his own ship (barque "the Lucretia") to the West Indies, and who died of yellow fever, and was buried, in the odour of romance, on the Isthmus of Panama.