CHAPTER IX.


Aunt Mercy had not introduced me to Miss Black as the daughter of
Locke Morgeson, the richest man in Surrey, but simply as her niece.
Her pride prevented her from making any exhibition of my antecedents,
which was wise, considering that I had none. My grandfather,
John Morgeson, was a nobody,--merely a "Co."; and though my
great-grandfather, Locke Morgeson, was worthy to be called a Somebody,
it was not his destiny to make a stir in the world. Many of the
families of my Barmouth schoolmates had the fulcrum of a moneyed
grandfather. The knowledge of the girls did not extend to that period
in the family history when its patriarchs started in the pursuit of
Gain. Elmira Sawyer, one of Miss Black's pupils, never heard that her
grandfather "Black Peter," as he was called, had made excursions,
in an earlier part of his life, on the River Congo, or that he was
familiar with the soundings of Loango Bay. As he returned from his
voyages, bringing more and more money, he enlarged his estate, and
grew more and more respectable, retiring at last from the sea, to
become a worthy landsman; he paid taxes to church and state, and
even had a silver communion cup, among the pewter service used on
the occasion of the Lord's Supper; but he never was brought to
the approval of that project of the Congregational Churches,--the
colonization of the Blacks to Liberia. Neither was Hersila Allen aware
that the pink calico in which I first saw her was remotely owing to
West India Rum. Nor did Charlotte Alden, the proudest girl in school,
know that her grandfather's, Squire Alden's, stepping-stone to
fortune was the loss of the brig _Capricorn_, which was wrecked in
the vicinity of a comfortable port, on her passage out to the