doubted of it, is Otomie the beautiful and proud. In the heaven which
I trust to reach, all the sins of my youth and the errors of my age
notwithstanding, it is told us there is no marrying and giving in
marriage; and this is well, for I do not know how my wives, Montezuma's
daughter and the sweet English gentlewoman, would agree together were it
otherwise.

And now to my task.



CHAPTER II

OF THE PARENTAGE OF THOMAS WINGFIELD


I, Thomas Wingfield, was born here at Ditchingham, and in this very room
where I write to-day. The house of my birth was built or added to early
in the reign of the seventh Henry, but long before his time some kind of
tenement stood here, which was lived in by the keeper of the vineyards,
and known as Gardener's Lodge. Whether it chanced that the climate was
more kindly in old times, or the skill of those who tended the fields
was greater, I do not know, but this at the least is true, that the
hillside beneath which the house nestles, and which once was the bank
of an arm of the sea or of a great broad, was a vineyard in Earl Bigod's
days. Long since it has ceased to grow grapes, though the name of the
'Earl's Vineyard' still clings to all that slope of land which lies
between this house and a certain health-giving spring that bubbles from
the bank the half of a mile away, in the waters of which sick folks come
to bathe even from Norwich and Lowestoft. But sheltered as it is from