most people's ancestors seem to have looked like the dickens."

Among these noteworthy family portraits I recollect one of "the Signer"
as a boy, standing on the shore and watching a ship sail out to sea; one
of the three beautiful Caton sisters, his granddaughters, who lived at
Brooklandwood, in the Green Spring Valley, now the home of Mr. Isaac
Emerson; one of Charles Carroll of Homewood, son of "the Signer"; and
one of Governor John Lee Carroll, who was born at Homewood.

The Caton sisters and Charles Carroll of Homewood supply to the Carroll
family archives that picturesqueness which the history of every old
family should possess; the former contributing beauty, the latter dash
and extravagance, those qualities so annoying in a living relative, but
so delightfully suggestive in an ancestor long defunct. If anything more
be needed to round out the composition, it is furnished by the ghosts of
Doughoregan Manor: an old housekeeper with jingling keys, and an
invisible coach, the wheels of which are heard upon the driveway before
the death of any member of the family.

Of the Caton sisters there were four, but because one of them, Mrs.
McTavish, stayed at home and made the life of her grandfather happy, we
do not hear so much of her as of the other three, who were
internationally famous for their pulchritude, and were known in England
as "the Three American Graces." All three married British peers, one
becoming Marchioness of Wellesley, another Duchess of Leeds, while the
third became the wife of Lord Stafford, one of the noblemen embalmed in
verse by Fitz-Greene Halleck:

Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt,
The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt,