of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was a
mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of those infamous
regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such cattle could
you be one of us," said my Aunt.

But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought in
some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was
reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.
In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men, these
were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If I
returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, a
chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of men and
women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine:
ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea--

"--besides having acquired," my Aunt was so good as to say, "sufficient
personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather
not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you will
have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear
through Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo's spirited, reckless son."

You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance
of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timeworn
familiarity.

"Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I," my Aunt
handsomely finished, "will make the journey a present to you."

This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my
flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly