I say it, but one day it will be proved to you beyond a doubt, that my
sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth lineal ancestor was an Egyptian priest
of Isis, though he was himself of Grecian extraction, and was called
Kallikrates.[*] His father was one of the Greek mercenaries raised
by Hak-Hor, a Mendesian Pharaoh of the twenty-ninth dynasty, and his
grandfather or great-grandfather, I believe, was that very Kallikrates
mentioned by Herodotus.[+] In or about the year 339 before Christ, just
at the time of the final fall of the Pharaohs, this Kallikrates (the
priest) broke his vows of celibacy and fled from Egypt with a Princess
of Royal blood who had fallen in love with him, and was finally wrecked
upon the coast of Africa, somewhere, as I believe, in the neighbourhood
of where Delagoa Bay now is, or rather to the north of it, he and his
wife being saved, and all the remainder of their company destroyed in
one way or another. Here they endured great hardships, but were at last
entertained by the mighty Queen of a savage people, a white woman of
peculiar loveliness, who, under circumstances which I cannot enter into,
but which you will one day learn, if you live, from the contents of
the box, finally murdered my ancestor Kallikrates. His wife, however,
escaped, how, I know not, to Athens, bearing a child with her, whom she
named Tisisthenes, or the Mighty Avenger. Five hundred years or more
afterwards, the family migrated to Rome under circumstances of which no
trace remains, and here, probably with the idea of preserving the idea
of vengeance which we find set out in the name of Tisisthenes, they
appear to have pretty regularly assumed the cognomen of Vindex, or
Avenger. Here, too, they remained for another five centuries or more,
till about 770 A.D., when Charlemagne invaded Lombardy, where they were
then settled, whereon the head of the family seems to have attached
himself to the great Emperor, and to have returned with him across the
Alps, and finally to have settled in Brittany. Eight generations later
his lineal representative crossed to England in the reign of Edward