descended from him would ever again be blessed with a daughter's love.
Not many days afterwards the child died, "whose involuntary coming had
been the cause of the Payne curse." Time passed on, and that "Heaven
is merciful," writes Sir Bernard Burke,[5] Stephen Payne experienced
in his own person, for his wife subsequently presented him with a son,
who was sponsored by the Duke of York by proxy. "But six generations
of the descendants of Colonel Stephen Payne," it is added, "have come
and gone since the utterance of the midwife's curse, but they never
yet have had a daughter born to them." Such is the immutability of the
decrees of Fate.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Harland's "Lancashire Legends" (1882), 4, 5.

[2] See Sir J. Bernard Burke's "Family Romance," 1853.

[3] "Popular Rhymes of Scotland" (1870), 217-18.

[4] See "Book of Days," I., 559.

[5] "The Rise of Great Families," 191-202.




CHAPTER II.

THE SCREAMING SKULL.