pass for it, and almost all are pure in thought, truthful, assiduous in
deeds of charity, and marry for love of those manly qualities which
they have already esteemed in their brothers.

Such a family were the Westcotes of Bayfield, or Bagvil, in 1810. Their
"founder" had settled in Axcester towards the middle of the seventeenth
century, and prospered--mainly, it was said, by usury. A little before
his death, which befel in 1668, he purchased Bayfield House from a
decayed Royalist who had lost his only son in the Civil Wars; and to
Bayfield and the ancestral business (exalted now into Banking) his
descendants continued faithful. One or both of the two brothers who,
with their half-sister, represented the family in 1810, rode in on
every week-day to their Bank-office in Axcester High Street,--a
Georgian house of brick, adorned with a porch of plaster fluted to the
shape of a sea-shell, out of which a. Cupid smiled down upon a brass
plate and the inscription "WESTCOTE AND WESTCOTE," and on the first
floor, with windows as tall as the rooms, so that from the street you
could see through one the shapely legs of Mr. Endymion Westcote at his
knee-hole table, and through another the legs of Mr. Narcissus. The
third and midmost window was a dummy, having been bricked up to avoid
the window-tax imposed by Mr. Pitt--in whose statesmanship, however,
the brothers had firmly believed. Their somewhat fantastic names were
traditional in the Westcote pedigree and dated from, the seventeenth
century.

Endymion, the elder, (who took the lead of Narcissus in all, things),
was the fine flower of the Westcote stocks, and, out of question, the
most influential man in Axcester and for many a mile round justice of
the Peace for the county of Somerset and Major of its Yeomanry, he
served "our town," (so he called it) as Overseer of the Poor, Governor