Feb. 7, 1863.]
ONCE A WEEK.
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THE WRATH OF MISTRESS ELIZABETH GWYNNE.
Every family has its own romance. Every house of decent respectability and antiquity has its own ghost. Families possessing neither romance nor ghost rest their claims to respect on the achievements of some mysterious hero, who by battle, by duel, or by rapine, has won renown; or, better still, of some heroine, slain by a harsh husband, drowned in an ancestral moat, or immortalised by the fame of her beauty. Those who can boast neither thrilling history, nor hero, whether natural or spiritual, can scarcely be alled families at all. They are merely a zoological congeries of uninteresting individuals, and have no right to intrude themselves on public notice.
It has lately been my fortune to have been staying in the country-house of a family eminently deserving of the name. Their annals are rich in incident, and the lives of all their kith and kin would make up a (by no means contemptible) history of England. In three rooms in their old dwelling, guests are never lodged; for in each of these three rooms a white lady, or a black knight, or some other incomprehensible inhabitant, is sureVOL. VIII.
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