well "within the sound of Bow bells".

Though born in London, however, full three quarters of my blood are
Irish. My dear mother was a Morris--the spelling of the name having been
changed from Maurice some five generations back--and I have often heard
her tell a quaint story, illustrative of that family pride which is so
common a feature of a decayed Irish family. She was one of a large
family, and her father and mother, gay, handsome, and extravagant, had
wasted merrily what remained to them of patrimony. I can remember her
father well, for I was fourteen years of age when he died. A bent old
man, with hair like driven snow, splendidly handsome in his old age,
hot-tempered to passion at the lightest provocation, loving and wrath in
quick succession. As the family grew larger and the moans grew smaller,
many a pinch came on the household, and the parents were glad to accept
the offer of a relative to take charge of Emily, the second daughter. A
very proud old lady was this maiden aunt, and over the mantel-piece of
her drawing-room ever hung a great diagram, a family tree, which mightily
impressed the warm imagination of the delicate child she had taken in
charge. It was a lengthy and well-grown family tree, tracing back the
Morris family to the days of Charlemagne, and branching out from a stock
of "the seven kings of France". Was there ever yet a decayed. Irish
family that did not trace itself back to some "kings"? and these
"Milesian kings"--who had been expelled from France, doubtless for good
reasons, and who had sailed across the sea and landed in fair Erin, and
there had settled and robbed and fought--did more good 800 years after
their death than they did, I expect, during their ill-spent lives, if
they proved a source of gentle harmless pride to the old maiden lady who
admired their names over her mantel-piece in the earlier half of the
present century. And, indeed, they acted as a kind of moral thermometer,
in a fashion that would much have astonished their ill-doing and