so meagre estate, where he must have lived among enmities, or must have
diced, drunk, and hunted with the rest of his kinsmen and neighbours.

I have a faint memory of my aunt, Gainor Wynne, as being fond of discussing
the matter, and of how angry this used to make my father. She had a notion
that my father knew more than he was willing to say, and that there had
been something further agreed between the brothers, although what this was
she knew not, nor ever did for many a day. She was given, however, to
filling my young fancy with tales about the greatness of these Wynnes, and
of how the old homestead, rebuilded in James I.'s reign, had been the nest
of Wynnes past the memory of man. Be all this as it may, we had lost
Wyncote for the love of a freer air, although all this did not much concern
me in the days of which I now write.

Under the mild and just rule of the proprietary, my grandfather Hugh
prospered, and in turn his son John, my father, to a far greater extent.
Their old home in Wales became to them, as time went on, less and less
important. Their acres here in Merion and Bucks were more numerous and more
fertile. I may add that the possession of many slaves in Maryland, and a
few in Pennsylvania, gave them the feeling of authority and position, which
the colonial was apt to lose in the presence of his English rulers, who,
being in those days principally gentlemen of the army, were given to
assuming airs of superiority.

In a word, my grandfather, a man of excellent wits and of much importance,
was of the council of William Penn, and, as one of his chosen advisers,
much engaged in his difficulties with the Lord Baltimore as to the
boundaries of the lands held of the crown. Finally, when, as Penn says, "I
could not prevail with my wife to stay, and still less with Tishe," which
was short for Laetitia, his daughter, an obstinate wench, it was to men