England, respecting the noble science. These works proved, to her perfect
satisfaction, not only that the Esmonds were descended from noble Norman
warriors, who came into England along with their victorious chief, but
from native English of royal dignity: and two magnificent heraldic trees,
cunningly painted by the hand of the Colonel, represented the family
springing from the Emperor Charlemagne on the one hand, who was drawn in
plate-armour, with his imperial mantle and diadem, and on the other from
Queen Boadicea, whom the Colonel insisted upon painting in the light
costume of an ancient British queen, with a prodigious gilded crown, a
trifling mantle of furs, and a lovely symmetrical person, tastefully
tattooed with figures of a brilliant blue tint. From these two
illustrious stocks the family-tree rose until it united in the thirteenth
century somewhere in the person of the fortunate Esmond who claimed to
spring from both.

Of the Warrington family, into which she married, good Madam Rachel
thought but little. She wrote herself Esmond Warrington, but was
universally called Madam Esmond of Castlewood, when after her father's
decease she came to rule over that domain. It is even to be feared that
quarrels for precedence in the colonial society occasionally disturbed
her temper; for though her father had had a marquis's patent from King
James, which he had burned and disowned, she would frequently act as if
that document existed and was in full force. She considered the English
Esmonds of an inferior dignity to her own branch; and as for the colonial
aristocracy, she made no scruple of asserting her superiority over the
whole body of them. Hence quarrels and angry words, and even a scuffle or
two, as we gather from her notes, at the Governor's assemblies at
Jamestown. Wherefore recall the memory of these squabbles? Are not the
persons who engaged in them beyond the reach of quarrels now, and has not
the republic put an end to these social inequalities? Ere the