stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can
pronounce a single word, my name, "Augustus!" in a tone that renders
further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of
certain newcomers in our society, "I don't know them." She can make her
curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "take
umbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to take
outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all
Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was
talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English
religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote
it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had--
"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give you her
own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and by
this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no
grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to every-
thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers and no
dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to nothing and
back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty and improving
milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola. Of course, with
Uncle Andrew's money, she does not live in a boarding-house; and I shall
finish this brief attempt to place her before you by adding that she can
be very kind, very loyal, very public-spirited, and that I am truly
attached to her.

"Upon your mother's side of the family," she said, "of course."

"Me!" I did not have to feign amazement.

My Aunt was silent. "Me descended from a king?"